Georgia Heard

Bringing Poetry into Everyday Life
Welcome!

We all have poetry inside us, and I believe that poetry is for everyone, but can we recognize it when we hear it, in our students, and in ourselves? Whether you are a teacher, poet or child our challenge is to find the poetry all around us every day!

That's one of my goals when I teach poetry is to help every student find the poetry inside.

My New Book on Heart Mapping!

Ever since my book Awakening the Heart was first published, and I wrote about my idea of heart mapping, teachers, parents and students from all over the world have created heart maps and shared them with me. I'm now publishing a book about heart mapping with many beautiful examples included! I would love to publish your students' heart maps.
Please scan and email heart maps to: heard_georgia@​yahoo.com
or mail to:
Georgia Heard
2655 North Ocean Drive Suite #310F
Singer Island, FL 33404 (If you can -- please include a permission form with the student's name and address, parent or guardian's sugnature, teacher's name, grade and school address, and any accompanying explanation, writing or poem)
Heart maps can be created by writing, drawing, collage, photos, etc.
Here are some questions that might inspire students:
What has really affected your heart?
What people have been important to you?
What are some experiences that you will never forget?
What happy or sad memories do you have?
What secrets have you kept in your heart?



How to Order Books

Check out Stenhouse.com to order Georgia's newest professional book A Place for Wonder: reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades (2009) and www.heinemann.com to order Georgia Heard's other professional books and www.amazon.com for Georgia's children's books. Also, to read more information about her latest book Climb Inside a Poem: Reading and Writing Poetry Across the School Year go to www.climbinsideapoem.com.

Books by Georgia Heard

A Place for Wonder: Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades by Georgia Heard and Jen McDonough (Stenhouse, 2009)


My newest book (co-authored with Jen McDonough) explores the practical ways teachers can create a classroom environment where students' questions and observations are part of daily work. It includes how to set up "wonder centers," teaching nonfiction research writing, and much more.



Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems (Roaring Brook Press)

My newest children's poetry is a collection of list poems to inspire young poets to write their own poems.
Each list poem is carefully selected so that readers see the extraordinary in the ordinary. Some of the poets include: Lee Bennett Hopkins; Jane Yolen; Naomi Shihab Nye; Liz Rosenberg; and Eileen Spinelli, Rebecca Kai Dotlich and many others!

Climb Inside a Poem: Reading and Writing Poetry Across the Year

In this book Georgia Heard and Lester Laminack tap into children's poetic natural inclination and demonstrate how reading and writing poetry can support and extend young children's language and literacy development.

The Revision Toolbox: Teaching Techniques That Work

Georgia Heard shows you how to reassure your students that revision is not an indicator of bad writing, but an integral part of the writing process. The Revision Toolbox provides ready-to-use strategies that take the mystery out of teaching revision and help even the most reluctant writers revise.

Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School

Awakening the Heart explores how to cultivate the poet in every elementary and middle school student - through well-drawn examples, detailed exercises, creative projects, and down-to-earth classroom teachings.

Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way

Writing Toward Home offers practical advice on overcoming some of the obstacles writers of all ages face: writer's block; fear of rejection; confronting silencing critics in your head; finding the time to write. Each short chapter speaks to the larger truths about writing and how to truly live the writer's life: how to become more of a risk taker; how to excavate the past as a source; and how to become an acute observer of the world.

For the Good of the Earth and Sun: Teaching Poetry

For the Good of the Earth and Sun offers a method of teaching poetry that respects the intelligence of students and teachers and that can build upon their basic originality. This book provides detailed, organized information so that teachers themselves can begin to enjoy and feel knowledgeable about poetry and then pass those feelings onto their students. The author's text is supplemented by samples of students' work in original and draft form.

This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort

This anthology of beautiful and powerful poems and illustrations will help children all over the world get through difficult times and continue "to live," "to laugh," and "to sing."

Songs of Myself: An Anthology of Poems and Art

Georgia Heard brings together twelve poems and one traditional song about identity and the self with a variety of original art as illustrations.