Unseen Poetry - Analysing Structure!

This engaging and interesting lesson enables students to develop the knowledge and skills needed to analyse the structural features of previously unseen poems. In particular, they define and understand each of the key structural devices, practice identifying them in poems and analyse their effectiveness upon the reader.

The lesson utilises a range of tasks, that require students to be both independent and collaborative learners. It follows this learning journey:

-Defining and exemplifying each of the structural features through a group card-sorting activity;
-Identifying each of the structural features in two poems through an exploratory task;
-Understanding the writer’s intentions and the effect on the reader of various structural techniques;
-Applying their understanding of the structural features and their effect to a comparison between two related poems;
-Peer-evaluating their learning in the lesson.

Included in this resource pack are:
-A well-presented, thorough, and informative, whole-lesson PowerPoint presentation;
-Structural features cards for the card-sorting activity;
-‘Analysing Structural Techniques’ worksheet for the development task;
-Copies of the poems ‘The Falling Leaves’ by Margaret Postgate Cole and ‘next to of course god america i’ by E.E. Cummings for annotation (both freely available online);
-A structure strip, a model example and a success criteria to guide the students throughout their comparative essay attempts;
-A comprehensive teacher guidance form/lesson plan to assist delivery.

Resources are provided in both Word (for easy editing - find in the zip file)and PDF (to prevent formatting issues between computers).
All images in this resource are licensed for commercial use, and are cited on the final slide of the lesson presentation.