A new activity engaged eighth-grade English students this week as part of their poetry unit.

In Poetry Madness, students selected poems to enter into the "competition" and voted, first in class sections and then as an entire grade-gathered together, to determine which of the following poems should move forward.

• School  by Shel Silverstein
• ‘I heard a Fly buzz’  by Emily Dickinson
• Theories About the Universe  by Blythe Baird
• The Fist  by Derek Walcott
• Caged Bird  by Maya Angelou
• There Will Come Soft Rains   by Sara Teasdale
• O Captain! my Captain!  by Walt Whitman
• Jabberwocky  by Lewis Carroll
• My Shadow  by Robert Lewis Stevenson
• Fish  by Tom Absher
• Nothing Gold Can Stay   by Robert Frost 
• Fear  by Khalil Gibran
• Funeral Blues  by W. H. Auden
• To All the Women I Have Called Pretty  by Rupi Kaur
• Do You Carrot All for Me?  by Unknown
• Masks  by Shel Silverstein

In the end, Masks went head-to-head with Nothing Gold Can Stay. Students ultimately voted for Masks as their favorite poem!

This March Madness-style celebration of poetry helped students experience more poetry, get speaking and listening skills practice, and have a lot of fun.