Today’s post is written by Brian Hannon, a long-time friend who shares our love for teaching and poetry. (And is just fun to be around in general.) I share Brian’s LMS Curriculum website at my APSIs each summer and literally hear teachers gasp when they see the amount of quality lessons provided – for free. This is a site I use to introduce myself to new poems, learn new teaching strategies, and find AP style prompts on poems. These lessons work great for sub plans because they are laid out step by step. One of my favorite sections on the site are the novel units which feature three contemporary poems to pair with widely taught novels. I encourage you to take a look around the site, read about their future plans, and help them out if you can. – Susan Barber
Hello!
Our website, lmscurriculum.com, is designed to give educators the opportunity to find individual poetry lessons as needed, either by poet, theme, literary device, etc. In essence, teachers have the ability to construct their own units by name and need. However, many teachers have been asking us to compile some of our lessons into complete units, each one focused on a different subject and designed to be taught all within a set time frame. So this summer, LMS Curriculum has been working hard to gather our lessons from our curriculum (and create new ones!) and tidy them into separate, distinct, ready-made units.
Each of the units we created were created based on the input we heard from you all in terms of what people “typically” teach in classrooms and what people wanted to teach but never got around to. The titles of the units and their brief descriptions are as follows:
- “Introduction to Poetry”
- This unit is designed to take students through a few of the “fundamental” elements of poetry and introduce them to the ways in which poets utilize these tools in their own writing.
- “Structure and Sound”
- This unit is designed to introduce students to several of the literary elements that are more specific and/or unique to poetry. By exploring these elements, students will gain a deeper understanding of how poets use language, structure, and stylistic devices to convey meaning and evoke emotions.
- “AP Skills Poetry Unit”
- This unit is designed to directly address the seven core skills of the AP Literature & Composition framework. Each lesson allows students to read complex texts analytically, craft well-reasoned arguments, and examine the choices writers make in structure, style, and language. All lessons are aligned to the AP Literature & Composition curricular guidelines.
- “Past & Present: Examining Classic Poetry Through a Contemporary Lens”
- This unit is designed to familiarize students with older works by giving them the opportunity to identify common themes, elements, characteristics, etc. with more contemporary texts. The unit starts with a brief introduction to the art of reading old texts and then segues into focused paired poetry lessons.
- “Music & Poetry”
- This unit focuses on the study of music, both contemporary and classic, as a means of developing a richer appreciation for the cultural, social, and historical contexts that shape both music and poetry while also fostering students’ writing, critical thinking, and analytical skills.
Like all of our lessons, we encourage you to take the lessons and adapt them for your needs. Feel free to move lessons around, swap poems with ones you’re more familiar with, etc. We just hope that you find the structured units helpful in your classroom in whatever capacity that may be. Thank you!
*Also…a kind ask from behalf of us at LMS Voice.
All of the lessons on LMS Curriculum and resources available on our site have been made pro bono; there is no “paid” position for the curators of the content/curriculum. Our goal in creating these lessons was simply to provide teachers with free, socially engaged, contemporary poetry lessons and the means to implement them in classrooms with relative ease.
We’ve been witness to the transformative power of poetry throughout the years, and we know the impact that the engagement with this artform can directly have on our students. In years past, our work with poetry (in the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area) has brought students from all walks of life together to local universities, the Kennedy Center, and even the White House, granting our students the unique opportunity to learn and grow from one another’s shared experiences. So, it only made sense for us to lend our expertise to our fellow educators – through the launch of LMS Curriculum – so they, too, could harness poetry in a manner to better the quality of our students’ education.
In order for us to continue our mission and expand the breadth of our work, though, we can use your help!
We have several projects on the horizon, all of which require help from our friends, family, and community. The first of the two immediate projects we’re trying to jumpstart is our own iteration of a youth poet “ambassador” program, something we hope to expand to more schools throughout the country. The other project we’d like to pursue is a “traveling” LMS Chat series: we’d go to several different cities throughout the year, host a Q&A/writing workshop with a poet in the community, and visit local classrooms to facilitate learning seminars or lessons. All of the projects, as always, would come at no cost to students, teachers, and any members of the community who may be interested in partaking in these events. One of the events that we’ve already put on, a live Q&A and writing workshop with professional poet Alexa Patrick, can be found HERE.
If you’ve used our lessons, watched our interviews, or simply believe in the work we’re doing, we kindly ask for any donation you may be willing to share. All of the donations will go directly into funding our educational ventures and the continued pursuit of providing free resources to teachers and students alike.
To donate, please visit the following site.
Eternally grateful,
Brian Hannon & Joseph Green
*We are a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a 501(c)(3) charity. Contributions made payable to Fractured Atlas for the purposes of our programming are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
Brian Hannon is the Director of Secondary Curriculum for LMSvoice. He currently teaches AP Literature , AP Language , and English 10 in Alexandria, Virginia. Brian was the co-founder of the poetryN.O.W., and through his involvement with this organization, Brian went on to found the two largest youth poetry events in his area, the Hyper Bole and Louder than a Bomb. When poetryN.O.W. was absorbed by Split This Rock, a non-profit organization in Washington D.C. that meets at the intersection of poetry and social justice, Brian served as their Youth and Education Development Fellow.
