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I am currently working on a poetry unit in my classroom and I was recently introduced to this website by a colleague of mine. On this site you can find: funny poems, poetry lessons, poetry games, poetry podcasts (ideas for your classroom), cool kids' poem links, a rhyming dictionary and much more! You can also sign up for a monthly newsletter. So far, I like the site, and my students love the funny poems. It has been a great introduction to my poetry unit and the funny poems used as an anticipatory set are great-truly engage students!

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Jabberwocky is a poem written by Lewis Carroll. It is from his novel: Through the Looking Glass. It is written in nonsense language and has potential to be a fun poetry lesson for high school. The website offers ideas for using as well as background information on the poem. My kids knew about it from Johnny Depp in the current Alice in Wonderland movie. It might also work as a short piece of text for teaching some of the strategies we have talked about in class.

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Finding effective ways to teach today's student population is perhaps the greatest challenge facing literacy educators in the United States. As classrooms become increasingly diverse, educators struggle to find curricula and pedagogical strategies that are inclusive and affirmative yet facilitate the development of academic and critical literacies.

How might you apply some of the researcher's findings in your own (current or future) practice? Do you now of teachers who have implemented aspects of this type of critical literacy?

Prof. Clinton, In my own future practice the application from this article that I found most useful was teaching popular film and media in the classroom. In the new core curriculum I know that one of the standards includes comparing text to its corresponding film and evaluating and analyzing the changes that directors have made in adapting the text to film. It would just be a matter of finding a more current relevant film that has a corresponding novel that is grade appropriate and having students study the book before watching the film. I also see value in evaluating music lyrics in a poetry unit. As of right now the host teacher that I am working with hasn't done any of this. She abhors poetry and pretty much refuses to show films in class, although we haven't had much opportunity to since our school assigns readings based on lexile and right now there is no way to have a whole class read the same novel since their reading levels are all so different. I think with the core curriculum standards rolling out next year we'll really have to.

This article caught my attention because it was focused on something we just discussed last night: teaching to standardized tests. I like this schools way of thinking: they do not obsess about teaching to the test, but rather look at it as one section to teach for the whole year, like a poetry unit. Teachers cannot be ruled by standardized tests, but must take it into consideration when they are teaching students.