Two Poems About Rain

P5041960 -A

Rain In Summer

How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!
How it clatters along the roofs
Like the tramp of hoofs!
How it gushes and struggles out
From the throat of the overflowing spout!
Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
And swift and wide,
With a muddy tide,
Like a river down the gutter roars
The rain, the welcome rain!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

April Rain Song

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night –
And I love the rain.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Read the poems. List all the verbs that the poets use for the rain. Describe the images of the rain in each poem. Are there any similes in the poems? Compare the two poems: how are they similar/different? What feelings do you get from them?

You can copy these poems on a template or write your own and create some art. Get inspired!

Basketball Shape Poem

Read more

(περισσότερα…)

International Workers’ Day: Women In The Development Of The Labour Movement

International Workers’ Day, also known as Labour Day in some places, is a celebration of labourers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labour movement, socialists, communists and anarchists and occurs every year on May Day, 1 May, an European spring holiday since the late 19th and early 20th century. The date was chosen for International Workers’ Day by the Second International, a pan-national organization of socialist and communist political parties, to commemorate the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago on 4 May 1886. The events were triggered off during a labor rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day and in reaction to the killing of several workers the previous day by the police. The police responded with wild gunfire, killing several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more. Find out more about May Day along with language activities here.

The struggle for better labour conditions has been long and alive. What is often neglected in textbooks and the media is the impact women have made in labor history despite the numerous roles women have played to organize, unionize, rally, document, and inspire workers to fight for justice. Relevant sources and material follow below.

Bread and Roses” is a political slogan as well as the name of an associated poem and song by James Oppenheim. It is commonly associated with the successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Women in the labor movement at buzzfeed.com

Women in labor unions at shmoop.com

Women who sparked labour movement at theguardian.com

Women in labor history at  zinnedproject.org

Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 digital photo collection at zinnedproject.org

Bread and Roses slogan at en.wikipedia.org

Teaching Resources at bctf.ca

Poems for workers-An anthology at marxists.org

Get The Basics Of Figurative Language

 couch potato

Just Outside the Box Cartoons by Marti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work atwww.justoutsidetheboxcartoon.com.

Come on! Don’t be a couch potato! Before exclaiming: “I’m done with figurative language!” take some time to STUDY the following resources. Then check yourself. I’m sure you will find it a piece of cake in the end!

Read more

(περισσότερα…)