Full unit plan: Songs of Ourselves (Cambridge IGCSE)

This 16-lesson (4-week) unit explores a variety of poetry from the 1500s to the present day. It examines several aspects of poetry, including specialist structures, rhythm, rhyme and meter, as well as techniques common to several types of literature, including personification, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. An effort is made in the unit to encourage text-to-self, text-to-world, and text-to-text connections in the pupils' readings. Contextual information about the lives of the poets studied is introduced as and when it is relevant, as opposed to systematically. Pupils consider the links between style, context, content and purpose. Their studies of poetry culminate in the production of a piece of official coursework – an essay addressing a key theme across several poems studied.

The unit was designed for students studying the Cambridge IGCSE in World Literature, but could easily adapted for (I)GCSE, IB or A-Level students studying the same poems.

The poems for which there are lesson plans in this unit are as follows:

Futility (Wilfred Owen)
The Death Bed (Siegfried Sassoon)
First March (Ivor Gurney)
Last Sonnet (John Keats)
If thou must love me (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
lion heart (Amanda Chong)
I years had been from home (Emily Dickinson)
Homecoming (Lenrie Peters)
The Border-Builder (Carol Rumens)
Rhyme of the Dead Self (ARD Fairburn)
The Caged Skylark (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Song (George Szirtes)
The Road (Nancy Cato)