Poetry Analysis

2026 Fall Semester Thursdays 2-3:15 Sept 3 - October 22

  • Yearly Calendar

    POETRY ANALYSIS happens Sept-October (8 weeks) right after Real Life Farm Science session 2

    Thursday classes are held September 3, 10, 17, 24 and October 1, 8, 15, 22 - Thursday classes are all 8 weeks long

    Real Life Farm Science & Poetry Analysis happen Sept-October (8 weeks)

    Note: Thanksgiving Break is the week of November 24, but RLFS and Poetry end before that.

    Winter Break December 9-Monday January 4

  • Bring shoes you run around in.

    Overcast weather = cold weather because damp air feels colder. To stay warm on overcast days bring: layers - hoodie, beanie, scarf, gloves, thicker socks and pants, thermos with warm liquid, a beach blanket (I’ll store that here for you!)

    Hot weather:

    • Bring bug spray.

    • Bring a hat and a water bottle,

    • bandana for dipping in cool water and placing it around your neck.

    • Loose fitting breathable clothes.

    Rain in the forecast: on any day with rain in the La Mesa forecast, Sci-LA students must have

    • rain boots,

    • a rain coat or rain poncho,

    • and spare set of socks.

    Wet kids are cold kids who are not learning and certainly aren't having fun. Tips on rain gear are here on the supplies page.

Supplies
Poems for Memorizing

October 15, 2026

Homework is the same every week: memorize one poem.

Classwork summary:

  • Reciting our memorized poem to a slightly larger group. Most students have 5 poems memorized!

  • New poems to memorize— pages 5 & 6

  • CLOSE READING: of Close reading of “This is Just to Say” and “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams - poems about mundane things.

    • tone

    • free verse

    • enjambment

    • juxtaposition

    • precise diction

    • images

  • Dueling with poetry: writing our own poems in the style of William Carlos Williams about an ordinary object or experience

Helpful Forms & Handouts

GENERAL FORMS:Table of Contents

POETRY & LITERARY ANALYSIS:

October 1, 2026

Homework is the same every week: memorize one poem.

Classwork summary:

  • Reciting our memorized poem to a slightly larger group.

  • New poems to memorize.

  • Discussion of powerful human emotions. Discussion of what we do to calm down/find peace when we are worried as preparation for reading “The Peace of Wild Things” in which the speaker reflects on how they find peace when they worry about the state of the world.

  • CLOSE READING: of “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry — adding literary devices we discover to our poetry bingo definitions board.

    • allusion

    • enjambment

    • precise diction

Helpful Forms & Handouts

GENERAL FORMS:Table of Contents

POETRY & LITERARY ANALYSIS:

September 24, 2026

Homework is the same every week: memorize one poem.

Classwork summary:

  • Reciting our memorized poem to a slightly larger group. Student shared a poem his dad wrote— we talked about how poems can be about anything! In fact our focus today was a poem about cheating to make a parent proud, parent child relationship, and disappointment. Short but deep.

  • New poems to memorize. Students got two new pages of poems for selecting a poem to memorize. They are enjoying finding new poems by an author whose work they already memorized!

  • CLOSE READING: of “The Hunter” by Ogden Nash, “Girls Can, Too” by Lee Bennet Hopkins, most of our time was spent on “Losing Face” by Janet S. Wong — adding literary devices we discover to our poetry bingo definitions board.

    • Enjambment — how that draws attention to unexpected parts of a line, contributing to dramatic emotion/mood swings in the poem.

    • Parallelism

    • Auditory and visual sensory imagery

    • Varied line length — including very short abrupt, powerful lines

    • Rhymes without rhythmic pattern — feels unmoored like the speaker’s emotions

    • Poems with an unexpected turn/twist at the end (“The Hunter,” “Girls Can, Too,” “Losing Face”

    • Finding evidence from the text to support interpretation

Helpful Forms & Handouts

GENERAL FORMS:Table of Contents

POETRY & LITERARY ANALYSIS:

September 17, 2026

Homework is the same every week: memorize one poem.

Classwork summary:

  • Reciting our memorized poem to a slightly larger group.

  • Indirect metaphors

  • CLOSE READING: of “A Fine Head of Lettuce” by Jack Prelutsky and “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Indirect metaphor, personification, rhyme scheme, repetition, line, stanza. Paraphrasing, close reading. Literal vs. metaphor. Finding evidence from the text to support interpretation

Helpful Forms & Handouts

GENERAL FORMS:Table of Contents

POETRY & LITERARY ANALYSIS:

September 10, 2026

Homework is the same every week: memorize one poem.

Classwork summary:

  • Reciting our memorized poem and choosing a new poem to memorize.

  • CLOSE READING: of “A Bee Sets Sail” — literary devices/structure: personification, anthropomorphism, metaphor, alliteration, rhyme scheme, repetition, line, stanza. Added these terms to our literary bingo page with definitions.

  • Haiku — multiple translations of same poem- which do we prefer? why?

  • Dueling with poems: time to write own poem — similar style as one we read today.

Helpful Forms & Handouts

GENERAL FORMS:Table of Contents

POETRY & LITERARY ANALYSIS:

September 3, 2026

Homework is the same every week: memorize one poem.

Classwork summary:

  • Get to know you. Create a simile about yourself: My name is so-and-so and I am like ________________ natural feature/organism/phenomenon.

  • Creating similes for crowds at Sea World and a class of students at Farm School. Crowd: ________, which we then compared to Ezra Pound’s metaphor in “In a station of the Metro” Comparision of Pound’s actual poem and a version of his poem that is more traditional.

  • Broadening our perception of topics and formats of poems: narrative poems such as “Casey at the Bat,” short haikus, and “Lying while Birding.”

  • Introduction to CLOSE READING: Close reading of “Lying while Birding” with particular attention created to spacing of words on page and what that suggest and “In a station of the Metro” — attending to word choice, connotations, and slant rhymes (almost rhymes.)

  • Selecting a poem to memorize. Discuss memorization strategies. I highly recommend writing poem down, annotating it, reciting it out loud to a friend daily.

Helpful Forms & Handouts

GENERAL FORMS:Table of Contents

POETRY & LITERARY ANALYSIS:

Get ready for class. Gather all your stuff. This is pretty much the same general list as for Sci-LA & RLFS, minus the gardening gloves and index cards.

  1. Do you have all your supplies? Copy and paste this list into a word document and check off ALL the supplies so you are ready to go on September 23rd.

  2. Other supplies

    • Snack/ lunch, water bottle

    • Bug spray

    • Gardening gloves

    • Sunscreen/hat

    • Writing utensils: pencil and little pencil sharpener, colored pencils or highlighter

    • Tape or small glue stick. Optional small scissors

    • Spiral notebook or composition book for taking notes -this can live in your binder.  Wide rule.

    • Optional: Small sketch pad for Daily Observation (DO) and Drop Everything and Write (DEW) time OR just write and draw in  your notebook/comp book

    • Small three-ring binder for handouts. 

    • 3x5 or 4x6 index cards and something in which to hold those cards (a baggie or pouch is fine)

2. Set up your three-ring binder. Do you have the following in it?

  • Lined paper

  • Two tabs (one for work/handouts, one for lined paper)

  • Print out the “Table of Contents” form. Put this in your work/handouts section.

  • Put your name on the binder

3. Read up on appropriate Farm School clothing — visit the SUPPLIES page…. Farm School clothes protect your skin from scrapes, scratches, and are easy to work in and can get dirty. You can run, jump, climb, and work with animals and tools in them.