Concrete poems, poems that relate the placement of the words on the page to the meaning of the poem, provide an enjoyable literary experience that focuses students' attention on how a poet does more than simply put words together but can place them meaningfully on the page by paying attention to the subtle (or not so subtle) issues of layout. Using a collection of concrete poems, students draw conclusions about how a writer's choices play a role in writing.

Concrete poems, poems that relate the placement of the words on the page to the meaning of the poem, provide an enjoyable literary experience that focuses students' attention on how a poet does more than simply put words together but can place them meaningfully on the page by paying attention to the subtle (or not so subtle) issues of layout. Using a collection of concrete poems, students draw conclusions about how a writer's choices play a role in writing. This lesson reinforces literary structures that writers use to convey meaning and provides opportunities for students to reflect on the decisions they make as writers. Several examples of concrete poems are available on this website. (author/ncl)

This resource, tailored specifically to meet standards-based needs in the English language arts curriculum and directly applicable to career-tech students in Arts & Communication, is easily adaptable for many career clusters. Using concrete poems to encourage students to think inductively about how the meaning of the poems are shaped by the way they appear visually on the page, this site offers career-tech teachers the opportunity to apply similar principles of information from their fields.

This resource, tailored specifically to meet standards-based needs in the English language arts curriculum and directly applicable to career-tech students in Arts & Communication, is easily adaptable for many career clusters. Using concrete poems to encourage students to think inductively about how the meaning of the poems are shaped by the way they appear visually on the page, this site offers career-tech teachers the opportunity to apply similar principles of information from their fields. Marketing teachers, for instance, will be able to show how the connection between structure and lay out determine outcome and interpretation affects the visual appeal of advertising. Additionally, arranging and re-arranging, removing meaning from its obvious order and instead considering alternate possibilities, can be used to generate classroom discussions in many career clusters in order to demonstrate both the importance of and limitations of precedence.