Shakespeare and Poetry Units

The Shakespeare unit was interesting I was never really able to understand Shakespeare until reading it and performing it in class with our groups. After doing the group Shakespeare acts I definitely had a better understanding of it after acting it out, and seeing every other group act it out. I also liked the watching the film on the Hobart Shakespeare Documentary. It gave me a lot of good ideas of how to get the students involved with also understanding Shakespeare by acting it out in a play with their class. There are lots of fun and creative ways that you can use to help students understand the material. These are some good websites to remember for ideas about Shakespeare.
http://www.rsc.org.uk/exploringshakespeare/
http://www.fireflybooks.com/Shakespeare.html

The poetry unit was fun because I really learned a lot of new ways that you can approach poetry that’s less intimidating to teaching it to students. Like an example from Koch’s book on how to teach poetry by having the class work together in making poems so students can feel more involved. Also its important to have students start off poetry but not using rhymes because some students are at more advanced levels than others and it’s a way to not exclude anyone, and some students can write better poetry when they don’t have constraints on what they have to write or write about. Its important to let students be creative when writing poetry and learning. There are lots of neat and creative lesson plan ideas you can use with poetry, for example you could have the students write about their favorite animal, favorite Holiday, favorite color, favorite food, and whatever other ideas they might have. You could also have a themed week of poetry to get the students more involved in the unit that way. These are some good websites about poetry.
http://home.att.net/~teaching/langarts/poetry.pdf
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june00/poetryboxrules.html
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/elements.html
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/poeform.htm