For more than a decade, I’ve been teaching English in China. During that time, I’ve worked with pretty much every age group—from kindergarteners to university students, and one thing I’ve noticed is that older TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) classes generally lack a useful tool that can allow student to express themselves, play with language, and learn to truly enjoy English.

That tool is poetry.

The post Why You Should Use Poetry with Older Students appeared first on TEACH Magazine.

Writing is something that many students struggle with. As a third-grade teacher, I’ve faced my fair share of reluctant writers, from students who loudly groan when they see a writing handout to those who quickly become anxious and frustrated. But none of them were quite as resistant as Alex. This sweet, tiny third grader loved math class, hated writing, and challenged me more than any other student has in my entire teaching career.

Alex claimed every single day during the first month of school that he would “rather do a hundred math problems than write a paragraph!” Unlike your usual reluctant writer, Alex not only associated writing with anxiety, but also believed that being a great mathematician automatically meant he was not capable of being a good writer. Three-digit multiplication problem? Piece of cake. Composing a few sentences? Worst day of third grade.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been inspired by stories—in books and on screen, those told through animal tracks in the dirt and howling coyotes at night, or recited around campfires. Legends shared since time immemorial, family tales that bring the past to the present, contemporary narratives of the here and now. Stories of real places and real cultures, and ones of dragon riders and epic battles.

These are what inspired me and shaped the person I have become. They encouraged me to reach for the stars and never give up on my dreams; to be humble and kind and to invest in community.

My name is Willie Poll (she/her) and I’m a Métis author and educator. I am the director of education at the Moose Hide Campaign, an Indigenous innovation to end gender-based violence, and I’m also a judge for the 2025–2026 Kids Write 4 Kids creative challenge—a writing competition for youth to tell their own stories. 

There wasn’t a time where I didn’t see myself in stories. I was white, blonde with big blue eyes. Kids like me were the main character in all kinds of books and movies when I was growing up, but even from a young age I questioned their authenticity. Surely there were other voices out there, other tales to be told.

I grew up spending most days with my grandparents. My grandpa, who was both Anishinaabe and Métis, was somewhat of an old cowboy. Adventures of his horses—Gypsy, Gemini, and Flicka—were told daily, with plenty of photographs to accompany them. My grandpa was the hero of my story, a fearless trick rider with a spirit so gentle it was like he and horses spoke the same language. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be an old western playing on the TV at his house, one that portrayed a very different hero (a white cowboy) and a somewhat familiar villain (the Indians).

My grandpa grew up disconnected from his culture and with an abusive addict father. Sometimes I wonder what he thought, if maybe it was easier to see his own people as the villains, since the only connection he had to his Indigeneity was his dad, who was the family villain.

There are things he used to say that have always stuck with me, things that are untrue of our people—things he heard from stories told by colonizers. The history he learned was not ours, but theirs. He didn’t live long enough to see authentic Indigenous voices taking over the bookshelves or TV screens. He wasn’t around to hear Indigenous people tell their stories, and didn’t have the chance to learn many of his own.

I wonder what would have happened if he’d seen an accurate version of himself in the stories he enjoyed, if he’d seen the language, the love, and the strength of Indigenous communities. And then I remember that I am seeing it, in real time. I’m watching my nieces and nephew grow up learning their language, singing their songs, and I recognize the pride in their eyes.

In my work as an educator, I have been fortunate enough to observe youth voices at the forefront. To hear the stories that inspire them and the ones they create to inspire others. In many Indigenous cultures our children are revered as the most important part of our community. Our future. Being part of supporting and amplifying Indigenous youth has been my greatest mission.

As a judge for Kids Write 4 Kids, I also have the opportunity to meet some of our future storytellers—ones who will bring their own authenticity to what they write. This type of storytelling matters. Indigenous voices are not the only ones that have been silenced, ignored, erased, and written over. Haitian stories, Sudanese stories, Chilean stories, and many, many more. Every one of them is important, and there is room for them all.

Bringing these diverse stories into your classroom shouldn’t be a debate. They are merely adding truth to your teaching, and there is so much to be learned from someone’s truth.

In this way, Indigenous stories are what put the “truth” in truth and reconciliation. Not only are such stories a meaningful classroom resource, they are the foundation to a strong Turtle.

The post Adding Truth to Teaching: The Power of Indigenous Storytelling appeared first on TEACH Magazine.

As educators, we often hear the same question from students: When am I ever going to use this? It’s a fair and important query. When students don’t see a practical application of the content they’re learning, they can quickly lose interest and engagement consequently decreases. 

A 2024 Gallup survey found that only 58% of students aged 12–18 said they had learned something interesting at school in the past seven days, down from 68% in 2023. In that same survey, just 10% of high school students said they felt prepared for the future.

What can we do in the face of these alarming statistics? The answer may be surprisingly simple: embed more life skills into our teaching.

The post Making High School More Relevant: A Life Skills Approach appeared first on TEACH Magazine.

Since its launch in 2012, Kids Write 4 Kids has published stories by talented young authors nationwide, with all proceeds from book sales donated to each winner’s charity of choice. The contest is open to all Canadian residents enrolled in Grades 4–8, with entries accepted until March 31, 2026.

“Every year, we’re amazed by the imagination and originality that shines through in each story,” said Ivy Wong, Founder of Ripple Foundation. “Kids Write 4 Kids not only celebrates young voices but also empowers students to give back through their creativity.”

Stories are evaluated according to the contest’s official judging criteria by Ripple Foundation’s volunteer judges. Typically, one or two winners are selected each year based on overall scores. Winning stories are published as both e-books and printed books, available on major platforms such as Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play Books, and OverDrive.

For more information about contest rules, deadlines, and how to enter, visit www.ripplefoundation.ca/contest.

The post Kids Write 4 Kids 2025 Contest Now Open for Young Canadian Authors appeared first on TEACH Magazine.

For the past two decades, I’ve been reading, writing, and teaching about how poets try to depict the experience of trauma through verse. Although some people might think that this would be sad or depressing work, in my experience, it can be tremendously inspiring to encounter art that uses skill, intelligence, emotion, and creativity to capture the most frightening parts of what it means to be human.

More recently, I’ve seen how many of my students want to write about their traumas in poems. And I’ve also seen how difficult this process can be for them, how challenging it is to write a poem that fully captures both the immediacy of pain and its aftermath.

That’s why I decided to write The Wounded Line. I wanted to offer my students a helpful guide, a kind of roadmap for exploring a traumatic event through their poetry.

The book discusses reasons why it can be so hard to write about trauma. It also offers readers foundational information about trauma studies, provides more than twenty practical strategies for drafting a poem that engages with trauma, and includes nearly sixty generative writing prompts.

I wrote The Wounded Line with the struggles of my students in mind. I teach undergraduates and graduate students, as well as older poets navigating these questions on their own, outside of an academic setting. But the essential lessons of this book can also be used to help younger writers in high school who wish to use poetry to tell their wounded stories.

Among the concrete techniques I discuss in the book, one of my favorites to introduce to beginning poets is the use of list-making. As I explain in a chapter dedicated to lists and catalogs, “Sometimes, in response to trauma, the mind organizes. It tries to keep itself within strict boundaries. It looks for forms of containment. In a list poem—a poem that is structured as a catalog of objects, people, places, things—the act of ordering becomes a way to assert control.”

A poem that is structured around the act of list-making can convey the sensation of being inside a mind that’s traumatized, a mind that wants to order the chaos of the world as a means of controlling its own suffering.

And, in another chapter, I discuss how fragmentation can express the way grief, loss, and trauma can often split us into many tiny pieces. I write that, “After trauma, we are often made incomplete, and the poem’s task is to embody the hollows left behind.”

I then offer recommendations for writing poems that mimic this brokenness on the page. This can include using sentence fragments, incorporating lots of white space in the lines, and even shifting rapidly from image to image so that the poem’s thinking is broken into shards.

We all experience pain, and many of us long to transform that hurt into artful, compelling language. I hope The Wounded Line will be helpful to poets of all ages, whatever their grief, loss, or trauma.

The post “The Wounded Line”: An Accessible and Inspiring Guide to Writing Poems About Trauma appeared first on TEACH Magazine.

Like many people, I was required to learn a foreign language growing up. I was taught Spanish. It often felt tedious, leaning against a locker between classes, memorizing categorized vocabulary lists (things you find at the airport, rooms in a house, types of vegetables, etc.) and charts of irregular verbs and their conjugations (watch out for “hacer”).

But during my sophomore year of high school, a 4’11” nun named Hermana Catalina assigned our Honors Spanish 4 class to read Cajas de cartón by Francisco Jiménez. It was about a teenager roughly my age whose family had immigrated from Mexico to California and eked out a living by picking cotton, strawberries, and carrots. He and his brother had after school jobs, comical misadventures, and glowing ambitions.

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By Jenna Vandenberg

The summer before I started teaching, my cousin and fellow teacher gave me a beautiful notebook, and implored me to set aside time to write and reflect in it every day. She warned that classroom days would fly by quickly and at winter break, I’d have no idea how I’d gotten there. She told me to pause after the chaos of each day and take time to untangle all the student outbursts, questions, instances of non-compliance, and “ah-ha” moments.

To my shame, the notebook sat unused in my desk drawer.

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By Eric Hall

I love to write. I think I first discovered my love for writing around the fourth grade. My teacher had this incredible gift for making us believe our words mattered. Even when we weren’t exactly eager to put pencil to paper, he found a way to spark something in us. 

Whenever we shared what we’d written, he would rest his chin on his hands and listen—really listen—with a kind of focus that made you feel like your words were the most important thing in the world at that moment. 

Getting kids to write in this day and age, however, where entertainment is merely a swipe away, can be like asking them to eat their vegetables—met with groans, bargaining, and the occasional dramatic gagging sound. Teaching writing is even harder when you have to cover the driest parts of grammar, like diagramming sentences or memorizing parts of speech. But perhaps the trickiest topic of all? Figurative language. 

The post The Figurative Language Fashion Show: Where Words Walk the Runway appeared first on TEACH Magazine.

My first-grade teacher was Miss Glennah Powers. She was what they called in the 1940s a “spinster.”

Miss Powers lived within walking distance of Barboursville Elementary School; her house was a two story, frame, gray house which she shared with her brother, also single. She wore a gray dress every day—she must have had several just alike because she always looked the same. Her hair was piled on top of her head, and depending on how recently she had been to the beauty shop, it had a distinct blue hue to it. The dresses always came to just above her ankles, and she wore high topped, button-up black shoes. We learned to love her and thought she knew all there was to know!

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