Carol Ann Duffy Selected Poetry

This unit on selected poetry by Carol Ann Duffy is designed to focus on developing close reading skills and a holistic analysis of a text and body of work. The activities specifically focus on…

• identifying ideas and issues in a poem and in a collection of poems.
• appreciating the ways in which choices in language and form develop meaning and feeling in a poem.
• appreciating and evaluating a poet’s style.
• developing an understanding of intertextuality, and how writers might leverage a reader’s background knowledge to transform their perspective on a person, issue, or event.
• learning different approaches to critically reading, deconstructing, and analyzing poems.
• synthesizing a body of work through comparison and reflection.
• developing collaborative skills to appreciate others’ readings and perspectives when navigating challenging texts.

The resources in this unit include:

• An activity portfolio with specific activities and questions for each poem, including clear formative assessment tasks.
• Supplemental student handouts for some of the activities in the activity portfolio.
• Presentation slides to accompany the activity portfolio.
• A formative or summative unseen poetry response (included in the activity portfolio).
• A summative essay assessment (included in the activity portfolio).

The poems covered in this unit include:

Teaching Resources

A Note about the Resources

Activity Portfolio
The activity portfolio is organized by poem, starting with poems from the World’s Wife collection. It is possible to spend more than one class on a single poem, or cover two poems in a class, depending on how long the class period is. Each poem’s activities are in a single table, making it easy for a teacher to rearrange or cut poems as needed in the activity portfolio. When completed in full, the activity portfolio does get lengthy. Teachers may decide that they wish to divide this into separate files, or have students add one block at a time so that they most recent block is on top (otherwise, they may have to scroll through several pages to get to “today’s” lesson.

The poems use different protocols and approaches so that students are introduced to a range of ways with which to engage with poetry. Most protocols are repeated twice so that students gain comfort and practice with an individual protocol. When protocols have been adapted from an outside resource, this has been cited and noted in the footnotes.

Activity Portfolio Supplements
This file contains resources that accompany some of the activities in the Duffy Activity Portfolio. Some resources require printing (such as the “Assembling the Poem” activity) and others were kept out so that students could record their own interpretations and ideas before looking at others’ (such is the case with evaluating introductory commentary paragraphs or “interpretive statements”). Each supplement is clearly titled.

Presentation Slides
These slides are designed to accompany the activity portfolio. There are videos and other media linked and embedded in the presentation; if these are no longer accessible, please leave a comment so that we can find suitable substitutes.

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