Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons

Harnessing the power of poetry, Nancie Atwell's Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons empowers adolescents to make sense of their personal place in the world while honing their critical reading and writing skills. Naming the World's 200+ poems and accompanying five-to-ten-minute lessons are used by Nancie every day to jumpstart her reading and writing workshops. Poetry is the foundation upon which her students build excellences as writers in every genre. This is your chance to make the first few minutes of your Language Arts class really count!

Naming the World:

• makes it easy for teachers to find great poems--Nancie has culled the best of the best from more than ninety anthologies, collections, and journals;
• enables even inexperienced teachers of poetry to teach poems--shows how to read them with understanding and pleasure and highlight their features for students;
• empowers students to read poetry, love it, take it into their lives, learn its lessons about fine writing, and apply them to poems, narratives, and exposition of their own; and
• provides a common text for students and teachers to discuss a piece of literature together, and develop a vocabulary for talking about literary elements, without depriving young readers of essential opportunities to read books of their own choosing.

The 200+ Poems:

• are compiled from contemporary poets
• were nominated by Nancie's students as their favorites
• speak to adolescent interests and issues
• include poems by Nancie's kids to teach and inspire yours.

• are used daily by Nancie to jumpstart her reading-writing workshop
• apply a range of interactive and independent learning strategies
• present the language Nancie uses with her students.