Future Poets: Help for Aspiring Writers

“Future Poets” has One Hundred and One Poetry Challenges, Lesson plans, Poetic Devices explained, as well as Copyright-Free poems for speech presentations. It can be a stand alone poetry unit and is great for substitute teachers and last-minute lessons. This book is for all my fellow teachers who enjoy poetry and believe their students will become better writers if they keep practicing. Kids often just need something interesting and challenging to write about: that is how this book can help. Poetry, with its conciseness, emotion, and lack of punctuation, is a great way to begin each school year and ease the kids into other forms of writing. Poetry lends itself to success. Anyone can do it. And it’s personal; it comes from the students’ experiences and emotions. Poetry works well for engaging student writers because it is challenging and yet flexible. There are so many types and styles of poems they can experience. There is also a lot of leeway in terms of punctuation, idioms and slang, and how the words appear on the page. The emphasis in this book is students as poets. It’s not about studying the famous poets who have gone before. It’s about finding a love for expressing yourself that can last a lifetime. It is my hope that this book will help your students come to a better understanding of poetry and eventually feel confident in their ability to write poems.