Practical Poetry: A Nonstandard Approach to Meeting Content-Area Standards

Are you searching for instruction that reinforces standards-based content in language arts, math, science, or social studies?

That generates student interest?
That promotes critical thinking?
That doesn't sacrifice time in your curriculum?

Then it's time for a new approach.

In Practical Poetry, Sara Holbrook shows you how the precise language and keen observations of poems can be used as nuts-and-bolts tools for addressing content and language standards in four key subject areas. Whether you teach one or several subjects, Practical Poetry includes chapters specially written to show you how to promote content understanding and meaning-making in language arts, math, science, and social studies by taking poems out of the artsy ether and making them functional. Even if you aren't a poet, you'll be ready to use poetry in your class tomorrow because each of Holbrook's lessons:

• describes the rationale for how and why the lessons work
• identifies the specific content standards you'll be addressing in your teaching
• includes exemplar poems to use right away or to guide you in weaving favorite poems into your lesson planning
• provides examples of student work from classrooms where poetry has been used successfully as a vehicle for learning.

You might think you don't have room in your standards-based curriculum to teach with poems, but with applications to content standards woven throughout, Practical Poetry will prove that you do. Take Sara Holbrook's advice. You'll energize your students, reinforce their topical understanding over a variety of content-area standards, and build their critical-thinking and language skills. Poetry has never been so practical.

Sara Holbrook is the author of eleven poetry books for children, teens and adults. She has performed for audiences across the US and abroad, for children and adults, in schools, teacher conferences, and bars and once in a boxing ring in Stockholm. According to acclaimed author and poet Jane Yolen, “she does not speak a poem or say a poem or even perform a poem, she sticks her hand down the poem’s throat and pulls it inside out. She makes you laugh, cry, feel.” Her poetry book for teens, Walking on the Boundaries of Change, won the Parent’s Choice Award. She is the author of two poetry books for adults, Chicks Up Front (Cleveland State University Press) and Isn’t She Ladylike, (Collinwood Media, distributed by Bottom Dog Press).  Her work has been included in many anthologies, including Slam and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and she appeared in the documentary SlamNation.

Her most recent publications are Outspoken! How to Improve Writing and Speaking Through Poetry Performance (Heinemann 2009), coauthored with Michael Salinger, and Practical Poetry, A Non-Standard Approach to Meeting Content Standards (Heinemann, 2005).

 Visit Sara's web site at www.outspokenlit.com.