Hi fellow teachers! Are you looking for a new twist on a poetry activity for your intermediate or high school students? “My Belly Is an Ocean” is a poem for two voices, which can be used for performance practice, drama, or to complement SEL lessons connected to expressing strong emotions.
The poem is also built around metaphor, so can be used to teach or illustrate poetic terms such as metaphor or figurative language as well as alliteration or assonance (you’ll find examples of both within the poem). The print-ready PDF and PPT deck below contain two different versions of the poem – the two voices version and a read alone version that could be used for poem of the day, reading, or comprehension. For more advanced students, you could also use both versions together and ask students to discuss which version they think is the most impactful.
You have full permission to use the poem for teaching purposes within any educational setting, including online learning and homeschool.
Let me know if you use the poem – I’d love to hear how it goes.
Find a video of the “My Belly Is an Ocean” poem below, which you can use as an example for your students before they perform the poem or to complement the written text.
Original poem by Kim T. Harrison. Video created in Canva.
Download a PDF, black & white, printable version of the poem:
Download a PPT slide version of the poem:
Teaching Ideas
- Students can act out or perform the poem in pairs and/or to make it suitable for small groups, two students speak the poem while others act out movements suggested by the metaphors
- To complement or introduce SEL topics about expressing emotions. You can use the poem for discussion questions such as: Does your belly sometimes feel like an ocean? In what ways? At what times? How can we calm a belly that feels like an ocean?
- To complement poetic, literary, or textual analysis classes. Ask students to identify any poetic techniques in the poem and discuss their effect. Students could also respond to the poem by finding other metaphors to describe how they feel at certain times.
- Creative writing: Students create a response poem in the form of a potential third voice. If a belly can be a raging ocean and a playful ocean, what other kind of ocean could it be?
- Creative writing: In pairs, students brainstorm and choose a different metaphor to create a new poem for two voices to express two different kinds of emotions. You can scaffold this as needed (scaffolding examples are included in the PDF and PPT below).
Happy Teaching! Kim x
Many thanks to poet Carol-Ann Hoyte for introducing me to poems for two voices. To learn more about Carol-Ann and her work, visit Poetry in Voice.
Kim T. Harrison 