Slam Poetry: Power Through Performance (1 of 5)

• Students will be able to come up with ideas to write about
• Students will be able to write a beginning for their slam poem.
• Students will be able to speak and write about a topic they care deeply about.
• Students will be able to speak about observations they have about slam poems.

In this lesson, students will come up with ideas to write and start a slam poem. They will also analyze a slam poetry example.

1. Review Class Objectives / VR Skills
2. Quick Question: What are 5 problems or things that you would change about the world if you could?
3. Attention grabber: Raise your hand if you’ve ever been sitting in class and wondered, yeah yeah, I get it…but what’s the point? (Pause—this is your moment to be dramatic) Today is the point.
4. Connection: Share top responses
5. Slam Poetry Analysis: What I noticed in the performance
   1. What parts did you like?
   2. What topics did you like?
6. Starters:
   1. Introducing...
   2. What has happened to...
   3. There's a man I know that...
   4. This poem is for...
7. Work time
8. Share your favorite sentence from your poem

Anticipated Troubles

• Students not being able to come up with an idea: check students’ lists of 5 things to change—if done, play with the ideas they have, if not done, coach them through finishing it.
• Back-up idea: have the student write a list of 10 things you know to be true→ make a poem about that list.
• Students insisting they don’t know how to write a poem. Tell them to not write a poem, but a letter, or a rant (these work well for poems).  We’ll turn it into a poem later.

• Anaphora - Repeat the same phrase at the beginning of each line
• Conciet - Extended metaphor through the whole piece (Her tears were a river flowing down her cheeks.)
• Apostrophe - Talks to a person or thing that is not in the poem (the dead, long lost lover)
• Repetition - Repeat parts to reinforce the core

Video: https://youtu.be/GAx845QaOck