Dig deeper into the craft of poetry reading and writing with this focused six-week course introducing the basic poetic stanza forms. Learn to recognize stanza forms and how they function through practice in writing them. Acquire more language for talking and writing about the poems you read. Become a more sophisticated reader of poetry, as you explore further how a poem’s structure may enhance its meaning and your experience of it.

How to get the most out of Introduction to Stanza Forms: Poetry with Sally Thomas:

• First, read the course materials below before the first class meeting.

• Then have a notebook ready and available for class notes each live session.

• Read assignments before class meetings

• Watch that week’s recording if you need to revisit information from our live session.

• Do the assignments, quizzes, and any extra work assigned for that week.

• Once the course is completed to the parent's and professor’s satisfaction, there is a Certificate of Completion at the end to be filled in for your records.

Special notes: All course materials are provided FREE by the instructor. Includes a writing component.

Parents and students should be aware, as always, that this is a self-guided course with no instructor access. Like the other poetry courses in this sequence, this course includes detailed homework instructions and rubrics for evaluation. Parents should be prepared to have more involvement with their students' work than is often the case in Homeschool Connections courses. In an ideal world, the parent would learn alongside the student, but given the realities of busy family life, the course does offer built-in supports to make the parent's job as evaluator easy and straightforward. 

If at all possible, students should do all written work by hand, to mitigate the very real and all-pervasive temptation to use AI resources.

Total classes: 6

Duration per class: 55 minutes
Prerequisite: None
Suggested grade level: 9th to 12th grade
Suggested credit: ½ semester Poetry or Literature. For a full semester, precede with How to Read Poetry.

Instructor: Sally Thomas

Instructor email: sallytslc@hotmail.com

Course description: This six-week course will cover basic rhymed stanza forms in poetry, with standard literary terminology. Students will learn to recognize different types of stanza patterns and will practice writing in them, to emerge as more sophisticated readers of, and writers about, poetry. This introductory-level course is best taken as the third in a sequence, with How to Read a Poem and Introduction to Metrical Forms as prerequisites.

Course outline:

Week 1: Introduction, Review, and the Couplet
Week 2: The Couplet and the Quatrain
Week 3: Quatrains and Couplets: The Shakespearean Sonnet
Week 4: Quatrain, Octet, Sestet: The Petrarchan Sonnet
Week 5: Tercets and Terza Rima
Week 6: Repeating Forms: Villanelle, Pantoum, Sestina

Course materials: Handouts provided FREE by the instructor.

Homework: Homework will consist of five poems per week, to be read ideally one per weekday, carefully, with attention, multiple times, with notes to be submitted weekly. There will also be a weekly reading quiz, and a short poetry-writing exercise. Students should budget an hour, five days a week, on homework, inclusive of writing exercises and quizzes.

Technical Help: If you have any technical trouble or questions about course content, please email us at homeschoolconnections@gmail.com.

©2024 Homeschool Connections and Sally Thomas. All rights reserved. This course is designed by Sally Thomas.

• This material is only to be used for its intended purpose by active subscribers of Homeschool Connections. Any other use without explicit permission is in violation of the seventh commandment (yes, the 7th commandment) and in violation of US and International copyright laws.

• You may print or download to local hard disk extracts for your personal homeschool and non-commercial use only. This is not to be used for homeschool co-ops without express written permission from Homeschool Connections.