The Ramayana (ram-EYE-ya-na) and the Mahabharata (ma-ha-BA-ra-ta), the great Indian epics, are among the most important works of literature in South Asia. Both contain important lessons on wisdom, behavior and morality, and have been used for centuries not only as entertainment, but also as a way of instructing both children and adults in the exemplary behavior toward which they are urged to strive and the immoral behavior they are urged to shun. In this lesson, students will read an abridged version of the Ramayana, and will explore the ways in which the story of Rama contains elements, such as the Epic Hero Cycle, that place it within the epic poetry tradition.
Poetry provides us with a rich vehicle for helping children explore how language sounds and works. Students will use their senses to experience poetry.
Help clarify the nature of symbols for your students as they study the Statue of Liberty, complete research on a national symbol, and use their research to communicate a message of their own.
After a close reading and comparison of Edward Hopper's painting House by the Railroad and Edward Hirsch's poem about the painting, students explore the types of emotion generated by each work in the viewer or reader and examine how the painter and poet each achieved these responses.
This lesson plan explores the characteristics of the nonsense poem as developed by British poet Edward Lear and focuses on Lear’s well-known poem “The Owl and the Pussy Cat.” Students learn to recognize poetic devices such as rhyme, syllabification, and meter, and figures of speech such as alliteration, onomatopoeia, and personification, by analyzing nonsense poems and writing one of their own.
Similes are used often in literature, appearing in every genre from poetry to prose and from epics to essays. Utilized by writers to bring their literary imagery to life, similes are an important component of reading closely and appreciating literature.
In this lesson, students will learn the form of the limerick poem, practice finding the meter and rhyme schemes in various Lear limericks, and write their own limericks.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, una muy importante figura literaria a nivel mundial y la primer gran poeta de la América Latina, es un producto del Siglo de Oro Español.
Through reading chapters of Edith Wharton's book, "Fighting France, From Dunkerque to Belfort," students will see how an American correspondent recounted World War I for American readers.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the first great Latin American poet, is still considered one of the most important literary figures of the American Hemisphere, and one of the first feminist writers. In the 1600s, she defended her right to be an intellectual, suggesting that women should be educated and educators and accusing men of being the cause of the very ills they blamed on women.
