I don’t know about you, but April is a month that always sneaks up on me. One minute, we’re trudging through a never-ending, frigid March. Then, all of a sudden, it’s spring! The sun is out, the humidity is on the rise, and the school year is almost finished.
Even though this happens every year, I’m always a little bit surprised when April arrives.
With the school year winding down, I wanted to share 4 easy favorites for teaching in April.
National Poetry Month
Celebrating National Poetry Month is my favorite part about teaching in April! Here are some of my personal favorite activities for National Poetry Month:
- Use poetry task cards as bell work or at stations
- Spotlight living poets and your favorite anthologies
- Host a poetry “coffee shop” for students to share their work
- Adjust or organize your classroom library to put novels in verse front-and-center
To encourage students to try their own hands at writing poetry, I like to focus on well-defined, structured poetry. Students often want to reach for free verse, but my experience has indicated that giving students some structure actually helps them be more thoughtful creators. For this reason, I favor these two poetry forms:
- First, students love and are familiar with concrete poems, and yes, they even work in high school!
- Second, sonnets are more challenging for students, but I love this inquiry-based strategy for introducing them because it’s engaging, funny, and challenging! I also use this free rubric to assess students’ sonnets.
For me, National Poetry Month falls at a time of year when I desperately want to engage in fun, end-of-year activities. However, April is also test-prep season, so usually students need to focus on building specific skills. Over the years, I’ve put together several poetry collections targeted at specific skills. This April, my students need to build skills in vocabulary and story elements, so I will be pulling from those collections.
- 8 Poems to Teach Synthesizing Across Media
- 10 Meaningful Poems to Teach Main Idea
- 25 Poems to Teach Synthesis Thinking
- 10 Interesting Poems to Teach Inference
- 12 Poems to Teach Vocabulary Skills
- 6 Poems to Teach Characterization
- 5 Poems to Teach Story Elements
- 10 Poems to Teach Text Structure
- 10 Poems to Teach Point of View
- 5 Poems to Teach Allusion
Earth Day
I teach in a public school, so we don’t really celebrate Easter in the classroom. (If we did, then I would be all over George Herbert’s “Easter Wings“!) However, Earth Day and Arbor Day both fall in April, so we can get into the holiday spirit this way!
Especially when I’m getting students ready for state testing, I want to review steps in the research process. Asking students to research an environmental topic is a good way to review generating search terms, determining the credibility and reliability of a source, and evaluating an author’s argument. This can be a quick one or two day activity, and it works well with my favorite scaffolded notes.
To further our discussion of author’s argument, I love to use the SOAPSTones acronym. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay “Nature” fits the spirit of Earth Day and allows students to practice a variety of skills. Read it here.
Additionally, synthesis-thinking is often an important skill to practice ahead of testing season, so choosing a variety of texts about similar topics can be a good way to start that process. With Earth Day and Arbor Day in mind, these texts can be a good way to start a conversation across literature:
- “The Planting of the Apple-Tree” by William Cullen Bryant and “A Poison Tree” by William Butler Yeats are both about trees (so perfect for Arbor Day), but they have very different symbolic meanings.
- “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats and “Summer Morn in New Hampshire” by Claude McKay have very different settings, but the overlap in tones is ideal for teaching synthesis (and for welcoming April!).
- “The World is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth and “A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett are such different texts (a poem and short story, respectively), but they both share an environmental and conservationist message.
Test Prep
Since April does often bring standardized testing, I do want to share some of my favorite review strategies. (And I also want to remind you not to buy the hype.)
In the weeks leading up the state testing, students and I complete a KWL chart about the test itself. This is also when I begin establishing and repeating expectations for behavior during testing. Then, every other day, we will complete some kind of 15-minute test review as bell work. In the week before the test, I often choose a longer review strategy. Here are my favorites:
Spring Cleaning
Spring Cleaning is one of my favorite parts of April! I love to organize, shred, declutter, and alphabetize. This is something you can do independently, with your team, or with your students.
- After Spring Break, this is how I refresh and reset my classroom.
- Here are 10 Harsh Decluttering Truths I need to revisit!
- Going through my PD Library and passing along old titles is so satisfying!
- I also love a classroom supply restock: these are my must haves for my desk.
- Finally, as I clean, I like to do a little “look ahead” to May to prepare for EOY activities.
