Are you looking for more fun ideas for National Poetry Month? Check out our 20 Fun Poem Types You've Never Heard Of Blog & read to the end to snag a freebie! I spent my first couple of years teaching middle school ELA in downtown Los Angles. Those years were ripe with the creativity and energy of my own youth. One of my fondest memories of that time was a hip-hop poetry unit from authors Sitomer and Cirelli. The unit taught poetic devices like imagery, figurative language, and hyperbole with music selections from Tupac, Run DMC, Eminem, and poems by Frost, Hughes, and Kipling. My young students identified with the themes and appreciated the cultural relevance of the curriculum. Fast forward over a decade. I left LA, and now I am teaching American and British literature to juniors and seniors in college prep and advanced high school levels. I've gotten older and decidedly less energetic (gasp!), and I've started to lose that age connection enjoyed by many young teachers. There are some definite advantages to the experience and maturity, but there are also some definite drawbacks to losing the connection with youth culture. To bring back some of that connection, I recently decided to add music selections to my renaissance poetry unit for my 12th-grade British literature students. For each poem, we walked through content, scansion, poetic devices, and historical context. Then, I played a song with some relationship to the poem. We then discussed the connections between the poem and the song. I really enjoyed teaching this unit because it motivated critical thought around universal themes, and it was fun to experience pop music with my students in a meaningful way. As an added bonus, students were totally into the lectures because they were trying to guess which song I would play at the end. My unit had several renaissance poems, and I've picked out a couple examples to share with you below. I'd love to hear your thoughts on my ideas and your additions in the comment section! Poem: Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 Pop Song: