When The Teacher Isn't Looking: And Other Funny School Poems

Nesbitt, Kenn. When The Teacher Isn't Looking: And Other Funny School Poems. New York: Meadowbrook, 2005.

Kenn Nesbitt is a well known poet, especially for his poetry collections including When The Teacher Isn't Looking: And Other Funny School Poems. He has written seven books of children's poetry. This book contains numerous humorous poems that cover topics in schools including detention, homework, tests, and school lunches. Teachers can use these stories as an intervention to the student's fluency or to introduce curriculum topics.

Resources to Support the Text

Poetry and Word Games

This website provides the students with interactive games that the students can play that are educational. The students can choose from creating their own free verse poems to poetry word searches. This website might be a good tool in the classroom to use as a positive reinforcement and award the privileges to use it based on if the students have deserved it.

The Basics of Poetry

On this website, the students will receive a brief introduction on the elements of poetry. They will learn what poetry is, different types of figurative language, the tone of the poem, rhythm and meter and patterns. This site is very user friendly and easy to navigate for the students. It provides great examples of poems elements that can be identified in the poems in the book When The Teacher Isn't Looking: And Other Funny School Poems.
Key Vocabulary

Cafeteria, detention, principal, sharpen, ancient, nightmares, Roman, Greek

Reading Strategy

During reading, the students can engage in Split-Page Notetaking. On one side of the paper, the students can write down elements of poems such as imagery, metaphor, personification, simile, symbolism, allegory, irony, the tone, rhythm, and meter while on the other side of the paper write down specific examples of these that can be seen in the text that correlate to the terms that they previously learned.

Writing Activity

The students will write their own poem that specifically relates to a topic related to school.