In Unit 3, students move from considering what has inspired the poets they have been reading about to write poetry, to thinking about what inspires them to write poetry. For the performance task, students participate in a poetry presentation in which they read aloud an original poem and then explain to the audience with the use of visuals and evidence from the poem why they were inspired to write their poem. Building on their learning from Units 1 and 2 that many poets write about things that are important to them, students begin the unit by writing an original poem. For the mid-unit assessment, students revise their poems for word and phrase choice and to add punctuation for effect.
In the second half of the unit, students write their presentation explaining why they wrote their original poem and where you can see evidence of this in their poem. In order to do this, they analyze a model presentation to generate criteria of an effective poetry presentation, and then apply these criteria to write their own presentations. At the end of the unit, they choose visuals to support their presentations. In the second half of the unit, students also practice reading new poems aloud for fluency in preparation for reading their poems aloud for the performance task, and also in preparation for the end of unit assessment, in which they read a new poem aloud.