March is Women's History Month - How Will You Celebrate?

In the United States, March is Women's History Month. You'll find the 2012 National Women’s History Month Theme: "Women’s Education – Women’s Empowerment" can be inspiring and enlightening for both male and female students.

What an opportune time to feature the writing of females and to encourage students who are doing research projects to choose women as their subjects. Consider making this an international project and invite students to look at the contributions of women in all fields of endeavor from all around the globe. How about recommending research projects on women in the career fields the students are considering, especially those in STEM careers that seem to be key to future employment.

One of my favorite ways to challenge students to explore and expand their poetry repetoire is to assign them to pattern a published poem or use a traditional structure like the sonnet, limerick, haiku, or pantoum.

After doing their research, your students could weave what they've learned into an ode or epic, a lyrical poem, or one of those biographical poems or "I Am From" poems they probably experimented with in elementary school.

If your students are ready or it fits your curriculum to teach journalistic writing, you could have them write newspaper columns about these women, or persuasive essays pleading the case for their featured women who may not yet have been inducted into the Hall of Fame!

Of course, each of these assignments can be designed to be multi-genre and small group projects give students an opportunity to practice the range of skills your teaching this school year.

What may be fun for some students is to use what they learn about a phenomenol woman and write three different kinds about poems about her: a limerick, a pantoum, and a ballad, or a combination of their choice. It would interesting to see what personality traits, incidents or memories about the women the students choose for each poetic structure.