April is National Poetry Month!
This is a time to celebrate meter, rhyme, wordplay, and poetry overall as, " the best words in the best order." Poetry is a *distillation of a message into an artful form, and we could all use a lesson in *brevity.
April 23rd, the date of our class celebration, is also the 451st anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth! I could teach a yearlong class on all that William Shakespeare contributed to poetry, culture, and writing, but our focus will be a short introduction and a first glimpse and "nod" at "the Bard" for most students. His birthday then is an appropriate day to choose in April to dedicate to celebrating poetry along with our class studies of the form throughout all of our units this year. The students' goal on this day is to find a way to enjoy poetry and relate to the writing form by bringing in a poem that resonated with them in some way. They will have prepared a reflection in advance, and we have found our poems through library books as well as www.poetryoutloud.org.