The cure for "I hate poetry!"
Your students (and maybe even you) might cringe at the word poetry. For many, poetry feels like finding the hidden meaning the poet worked so hard to hide from the reader. If poetry confuses your students, they're likely to avoid it altogether.
In Whispering in the Wind, master educator Linda Rief provides a cure for poetry agony. She introduces "Heart Books," a project inspired by the Heart Maps of Georgia Heard. Linda has used Heart Books throughout her teaching career to help students read more poetry, connect with it, and see how they, too, could write poetically.
Help students find (and respond to) poetry they'll love
Linda explains how to create and use Heart Books in any classroom by:
- helping students discover poets who surprise and delight them
- using Heart Books as a pathway to find poetry that rings true for each student
- encouraging students to deepen their understanding of themselves, and others
- teaching students to respond to poetry with an authentic voice
How do you squeeze one more unit into your curriculum? This is not a book about teaching a standalone poetry unit. Instead, you'll learn how to use transition times for this learning-all those in-between times throughout the year, such as right before a new unit, and leading up to, or returning from, vacations or holidays.
Linda believes this is work worth doing in any classroom because "poetry is what 'whispers in the wind, ' guiding us toward deeper reading and a heightened awareness of what makes compelling writing."
About the Author: Linda Rief left the classroom in June of 2019 after 40 years of teaching Language Arts with eighth graders. She misses their energy and their apathy, their curiosity and their complacency, their confidence and their insecurities. But mostly, she misses their passionate, powerful voices as writers and readers. She is an instructor in the University of New Hampshire's Summer Literacy Institute and a national and international presenter on issues of adolescent literacy. She is the author of Whispering in the Wind: A Guide to Deeper Reading and Writing Through Poetry (2022), The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students' Thinking and Writing (2018), Read Write Teach: Choice and Challenge in the Reading-Writing Workshop (2014), The Writer's-Reader's Notebook (2007), Inside the Writer's-Reader's Notebook (2007), 100 Quickwrites (Scholastic, 2003), Vision and Voice: Extending the Literacy Spectrum (1999), and Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents (1992); she is co-editor (Beers, Probst, and Rief) of Adolescent Literacy (2007). For five years she co-edited with Maureen Barbieri Voices from the Middle, a journal for middle school teachers published by the National Council of Teachers of English. In 2021 she was honored with the Distinguished Service Award from NCTE and in 2020 received the Kent Williamson Exemplary Leader Award from the Conference on English Leadership, in recognition of outstanding leadership in the English Language Arts. A recipient of NCTE's Edwin A. Hoey Award for Outstanding Middle School Educator in ELA, her classroom was featured in the series Making Meaning in Literature produced by Maryland Public Television for Annenberg/CPB. For three years she chaired the first Early Adolescence English/Language Arts Standards Committee of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. In 1988 she was the recipient of one of two Kennedy Center Fellowships for Teachers of the Arts. She spent a month at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, writing prose and poetry based on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She read her writing in performance at the Kennedy Center, a program later broadcast on NPR.
