Jigsaw: Teaching poetry to middle secondary students

This photocopiable resource provides teachers with a range of poetry suitable for middle secondary years, and a wealth of suggestions and approaches for teaching the poems. Two Australian poets, Jeff Guess and Kris Hemensley, have provided drafts of their poems, enabling students to study the ways in which poets revise and perfect their work. Jeff Guess has also provided many suggestions for poetry-writing workshops. A section on performance poetry suggests ways in which students, in groups, can prepare poems for oral presentation.

Contents

A VARIETY OF APPROACHES                      

• Jigsaw poem — Alfred Tennyson                    
• Verse Riddles — Anglo-Saxon riddles, John Fuller, John Mole, May Swenson, Vasko Popa 
• Asking Questions — poem by E.E. Cummings                  
• Cloze — Percy Bysshe Shelley                    
• Sequencing — George Herbert, James Wright              
• Jumbled Poems — John Dryden, Vernon Scannell, Thomas Otway     

POEMS FOR PERFORMANCE                   

• Choral Speaking — Ogden Nash               
• Dialogue Performance —  Paul Fleischman, Roger McGough,  Gael Turnbull
• Readers Theatre — Allan Ahlberg, Paul Dehn, Peter Dixon       

WRITING POETRY

• Getting Started — The Joeys                 
• Memories — Marietta Elliott                 
• Tone — Jeff Guess                     
• Haiku — Jeff Guess,Roger McGough               

THE DRAFTING GRIND 

• The Drafting Grind — Jeff Guess, Chris Hemensley         

THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE 

• The Dramatic Monologue — Robert Browning, Carol Ann Duffy     

THREE THEMES

• School — Gregory Harrison, John Latham, Barrie Wade       
• Progress? — Vachel Lindsay, Raymond Wilson           
• Prejudice — Jack Davis, Jackie Kay, Jim Wong-chu         

POEMS FOR DISCUSSION AND ACTIVITY 

• Sounds and Pictures — William Blake               
• Perfect? — Jeff Guess                   
• Poems in Translation — two versions of one of the Songs of Solomon       
• Missing Words — John Donne                 
• Poems to Compare — John Donne, Richard Lovelace         

POEMS BY PETER SKRYZNECKI