POETRY ROCKS SCHOOLS

What if Edgar Allan Poe teamed up with the artists on your students’ playlist right now? That’s the idea behind Poetry Rocks Schools — and it’s exactly the kind of question that makes students stop, look up, and lean in.

Poetry Rocks Schools is a team of musicians, teachers, and technology professionals with one shared goal: changing the way poetry gets taught in the classroom. Their approach starts with the poems already sitting on a required reading list and turns them into fully produced songs and music videos, styled after the pop, rock, hip-hop, R&B, and folk students already have in their headphones. Every song is paired with a lesson plan built by classroom educators and aligned to Common Core standards.

For Poetry Rocks Schools, the goal is never just to make poetry easier to sit through. It’s to help students recognize that the feelings behind a two-hundred-year-old poem are the same ones they’re working through today — and once that clicks, students stop being an audience and start becoming poets and songwriters themselves.

“Poetry Rocks is one way to solve the ‘boring’ idea.”

— Ms. Elaine Hamilton

4th grade teacher

POETRY ROCKS SCHOOLS x BLACKWING FOUNDATION

Blackwing Foundation is proud to partner with Poetry Rocks Schools as part of the Pathways to Creativity framework. This collaboration reflects something we believe deeply: that creativity isn’t confined to a single subject. It moves through language, music, art, and every form of expression a student picks up. Poetry Rocks Schools gives teachers a new way to pull on that thread in their own classrooms.

In collaboration with Poetry Rocks Schools, Blackwing Foundation presents “The Poetry Series: Verse and Voice,” for grades 6–8. The series pairs six classic texts — five poems and one prose passage — with original Poetry Rocks Schools songs and music videos, each supported by a full slide deck and classroom materials built specifically for a middle school audience:

What Makes the Poetry Series Unique?

  • Six Classic Texts, Six Original Music Videos: Poetry Rocks Schools turns each poem — and one passage of Thoreau’s prose — into a catchy, fully produced song and video, spanning styles from folk to hip-hop to pop, ready to stream straight into a lesson.
  • Classroom-Ready Lesson Plans — No Music Experience Needed: Every unit includes a full slide deck with historical context, vocabulary, literary devices, and a poem-to-song comparison activity — aligned to Common Core standards and ready to teach with no background in music required.
  • Built-In Engagement: Like every Pathways series, the Poetry Series comes with vocabulary games, Quizlet sets, and Kahoot-style quizzes. Every lesson lives inside Google, so it drops straight into Google Classroom with no extra setup.
  • Social-Emotional Learning Built In: Pairing music with literature strengthens literacy, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Every lesson closes with a journal prompt that turns the poem’s central feeling back on the student — asking them to write from their own experience, not just analyze someone else’s.
  • Fine Art in Every Frame: The music videos aren’t just lyrics on screen — each one is cut against a curated run of public domain paintings, prints, and photographs, from Blake’s own engravings to Dust Bowl documentary photography to the Hudson River School. Every lesson includes a Reading the Art handout that pauses the video on a specific lyric and asks students to analyze the image, so a poetry lesson doubles as a visual arts lesson.
  • Students Move From Audience to Creator: The series is designed to close with Pitch a Poem, a capstone project where student groups choose a poem outside the series, build their own pitch deck, and make the case for why it deserves a spot. 

Our collective vision is to help every middle schooler discover that poetry isn’t a relic stuck in a textbook — it’s alive, it sounds like something they already know, and it has something to say to them right now. By bringing Poetry Rocks Schools into Pathways to Creativity, we’re giving teachers a resource that doesn’t just teach poetry — it makes students fall for it.