9 Meaningful Poetry Activities for Women’s History Month

March is upon us and with it comes Women’s History Month and March Madness and the Ides of March and St. Patrick’s Day and the first day of spring. There are so many directions that we can take our English classes in the month of March. Truthfully, it’s one of the best things about being a high school English Teacher. There are just so many ways to TEACH the SKILLS. So today, I thought I would share nine poetry activities for Women’s History Month and the skills that they help students to focus on developing.

9 Poetry Activities for Women’s History Month

Examine Tone and/or Point of View

I fell down the rabbit hole on poets .org the other day and I found the poem “Representation” by Alice Duer Miller. She is a poet I have never heard of before, but she was clearly a suffragette. Most of the poems on her author page were related to women’s rights and I highly recommend you check out a few of them, but “Representation” stood out immediately because I knew that it was an access point for teaching students to recognize tone.

Miller’s speaker is clearly not the author (another great thing about the poem because sometimes it’s hard for kids to fathom that the speaker of a poem is NOT the poet). It give students opportunities to do close reading for diction, tone and speaker.

Lesson Idea:

Make copies of the poem “Representation” for all of the students.
Read the poem out loud and discuss the parenthetical statement at the beginning of the poem.
Divide the class in half. One half will do a close reading of part one and the other half will do part two. Have them put boxes around the verbs and circle the pronouns.
In smaller groups (3-4) have students discuss what they observed about the words they marked, especially the verbs. Ask them to think about what the diction in the poem suggests.
Have them refer to a tone word list and pick 3-4 words that apply to their part of the poem.
As a class, come back together. Have groups share out their words. Come to consensus about which one word best describes the tone of the poem.
Finish up with a quick write to explain the tone of the poem.

Resources for this Lesson:

Additional Poems:

Ready to Use: Tone Anchor Chart with Tone Words List

Ready to Use Lesson: Tone in “Representation” by Alice Duer Miller

Introduce Feminist Literary Criticism to your High School English students with these activities
for Women's History Month.

Introduce Feminist Criticism

March is the perfect time to introduce your students to Feminist Literary Criticism. Have students examine the role of women in the poems or the role of the authors. Using literary lenses is a great way to get students to focus their close reading.

Feminist Criticism Activities for Women’s History Month

Use task cards to create stations.
Feminist Criticism Jigsaw: give each group the same question but with different poem. Have the expert groups share with different groups or with the whole class.
Have students explore poems by women on Poets.org. Then they choose their own poem by a woman author to apply the feminist lens.

Resources for these Activities:

Poems:

Ready to Use: Fe minist Criticism Anchor Charts and Task Cards

Collaborative Annotations Activities for Women’s History Month

Collaborative Annotations are are great activity for close reading anytime, but Pass-a-Passage and Poster Annotations work particularly well for annotating poems. For more on how to do these types of social annotations, check out this post.

Resources for this Lesson

Poems:

Hexagonal Thinking

Hexagonal thinking makes use of the six sides of a hexagon to challenge how students link similar and disparate ideas. You can combine this with one of the other activities for Women’s History Month by having student first study a series of poems through a feminist lens or collaborative annotations, then have them work to link ideas on the hexagons. This is great for critical thinking and synthesis.

Resources for this Lesson

Free hexagonal thinking tool kit from Spark Creativity.

Use Poetry Stations to incorporate these poetry activities for Women's History Month in High School English.

Poetry Stations Activities for Women’s History Month

Stations are a great way to expose students to a variety of poems by women. There are a few ways to design stations for poetry. The skills that your students focus on are endless and dependent on how you set up your stations. Here are some ideas:

Set Up One: Set up 4-6 stations each with a different poem where student complete the same activity like looking a tone or reading for diction or structure.

Set Up Two: Set up 4-6 stations. At each station, the students complete a different activity with the same poem. If students are moving in smaller groups, each group could have a different poem. Task Cards are a perfect way to set up stations quickly.

Set Up Three: Set up 4-6 stations that include history, information about the authors and poems.

Resources for this Activity:

Ready to Use: Literary Terms Anchor Charts and Task Cards

Ready to Use: Feminist Criticism Anchor Charts and Task Cards

Four Corners

In a Four Corners activity, you post four opinion statements. Students then move to the one that they agree with most. For this activity to work with poetry, you could post statements related to the themes of a series of poems or you could post poems themselves. Once students have moved to the corner they will work with, they should hold a discussion in the group and perhaps produce something in writing.

Resources for this Activity:

Poems:

Poems about Suffrage on poet.org

Ready to Use: Ophelia Four Corners (not strictly poetry, but does result in a feminist reading of Act 4 of Hamlet)

Poetry Activities for women's history month. Bring Women's History Month to life in High School English with these 9 poetry analysis ideas. These poetry activities engage students in close reading and feminist literary criticism and much more.

Gallery Walk for Women’s History Month

A gallery walk for poetry can be done in a number of ways. You can set up the posters ahead with a variety of poems by female authors. I like these poems (listed below) that were written for the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote. Then give students a note catcher to collect quotes from the poems or other information.

You could also hang enlarged poems and have the students make comments right on the poems using sticky notes or markers.

Another way to do a poetry gallery walk is as a follow up to collaborative annotations. If groups work on poster annotations, once they are done, other students could walk around and learn about the poems completed by the other groups.

Resources for this Activity

Poems about the 19th Amendment:

Women’s History Month Poetry Slam

A Poetry Slam is a brackets style competition. For more on how to host a poetry slam, head to this post.

Poetry Slam Themes for Women’s History Month

Contemporary Women Poets vs. Women Poets from before 2000 (or whatever date you choose)
American Women Poets vs. non-American Women Poets (British, Canadian, etc.)
Poems about motherhood vs. Poems about childhood
Nature poems vs. Urban living poems
Political poems vs. Poems about the home

Resources for this Activity

Ready to Use: Poetry Slam Guide (free)

Reader Response Dialectic Journals

You can use reader response dialectic journal with any poem. The students can have the whole poem in the first column or they can just copy lines. Then in the second column, they respond. For more on Reader Response, be sure to check out this post.

Resources for this Activity

Poems:

9 Poetry Activities for Women’s History Month

Women’s History Month is the perfect time to do some poetry with you students and the 9 activities for Women’s History Month are a way to celebrate the long history of women in poetry. I would love to know if you have any activities that you love to do combining Women’s History Month and poetry.