Welcome to Tidbits of Lit, a blog designed to explore online resources available to high school English teachers and brainstorm new and exciting ways to use them in the classroom!

The first website I want to suggest for use in the classroom is called Poetry Out Loud. Poetry Out Loud is the name of a competition sponsored by The National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation that seeks to encourage and foster an appreciation of poetry within our American culture. While the website provides poetry resources in order to help students and teachers prepare for the national competition, it also makes those resources available to anyone who would like to grow in their knowledge of poetry or even host an informal competition. There are four particularly valuable attributes of the website that I would like to focus on in regards to teaching resources:

• The online anthology of poetry organized by poetic form
• The option of bookmarking your favorite poem's by registering for a free account
• The video library which includes tips for poetry recitation and videos from past competitions
• An online collection of poetry read aloud by actors, poets, and artists.

As a teacher, I would hold a mini-poetry recitation competition in my classroom, following the same format laid out by the website's overview of the competition. I would first introduce the competition by showing a video of the previous year's winning recitation, and I would then move on to articulate the requirements of the assignment. Students would be shown how to access the online anthology of poetry and directed to choose a poem with a minimum of 20 lines. Students' first assignment would be to write out their respective poems by hand, and included a brief explanation of the form along with 5 figures of speech used in the poem. For homework, students would then be instructed to watch the video series on "Learning Recitation," and to create a document in word that uses the "comments" feature to insert suggestions of interpretive choices that can be made in the reading of the poem. Finally, students would have a week to memorize and perfect their poems, and on the final day of the poetry unit, students would perform their poems in front of the classroom and two guest judges.