This book serves as a practical guide, for teachers of middle-school students as well as higher grade levels, that provides clear and fully-developed lesson plans and activities that use the teaching of poetry reading and writing as a vehicle for developing students' own creativity and appreciation for diversity. The combination of theory and practice sets this book apart from other books, in addition to an original four-step method of making sense of poems. The book is divided into two parts: the first focuses on the critical reading of poems; the second focuses on the writing of poems,...