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.