Poetry can be neglected in senior English so one strategy to explore the mechanics of poetry, use creativity and use higher order thinking within the text content is to produce songs or poems about or by characters in the texts.

It forces students to empathise with the characters, review events of the texts and rearrange their content knowledge.

I have included some examples from my teaching this year. (Some of the lines (and original songs) are terribly lame, but I’ve been told they are effective mneumonic devices!