CLOSE Reading and Annotating Poetry

For our poetry unit, I focused on ballads (poems that tell stories). Ballads were an extremely popular style of poetry during the 17th and 18th centuries and deal with many colonial issues. We studied "The Highwayman", "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere", "Ballad of the Working Man", "The Black Velvet Band", and others. 
We worked together to analyze tone, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, bias and point of view in poetry, impact of figurative language, and overall theme and author's meaning. 
To complete the unit, students worked independently to annotate a ballad independently. While we have moved on from the "introductory unit" we will continue to analyze different types of poetry throughout the year. 

I have completely fallen in love with CLOSE reading and annotation - I find that by giving the students a rubric type break down of the items to analyze, they are able to practice the skill independently and come to very deep connections and thoughts on literature. This technique is very similar to Article of the Week, an idea founded by Kelly Gallagher. For more information on Article of the Week and example articles, check out THIS post.