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Common Core State Standards Text Exemplars

Poems to integrate into your English Language Arts classroom.

By The Editors

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One of the key requirements of the Common Core State Standards for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school. To better serve teachers who are looking for text exemplars, this collection brings together poems that have previously been listed in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts Appendix.

KINDERGARTEN - 1st GRADE

- As I was Going to St. Ives
Anonymous
- Mix a Pancake
Christina Rossetti
- Singing-Time
Rose Fyleman
- The Fox's Foray
Anonymous
- The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
Edward Lear

2nd AND 3rd GRADES

- The morns are meeker than they were - (32)
Emily Dickinson
- Who Has Seen the Wind?
Christina Rossetti
- Afternoon on a Hill
Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
- The Jumblies
Edward Lear
- The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Robert Browning
- Your World
Georgia Douglas Johnson

4th AND 5th GRADES

- A Bird, came down the Walk - (359)
Emily Dickinson
- Casey at the Bat
Ernest Lawrence Thayer
- Dust of Snow
Robert Frost
- Fog
Carl Sandburg
- The Ecchoing Green
William Blake
- The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus

6th, 7th, AND 8th GRADES

- Chicago
Carl Sandburg
- I like to see it lap the Miles - (383)
Emily Dickinson
- Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll
- The Landlord's Tale. Paul Revere's Ride
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- O Captain! My Captain!
Walt Whitman
- Oranges
Gary Soto
- The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
- The Song of Wandering Aengus
William Butler Yeats
- Twelfth Song of Thunder [Navajo Tradition]
Anonymous

9th AND 10th GRADES

- I Am Offering this Poem
Jimmy Santiago Baca
- Lift Every Voice and Sing
James Weldon Johnson
- A Shropshire Lad 2: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
A. E. Housman
- Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
William Shakespeare
- Song: Go and catch a falling star
John Donne
- The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe
- Yet Do I Marvel
Countee Cullen

11th AND 12th GRADES

- A Poem of Changgan
Li Bai
- A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
John Donne
- Because I could not stop for Death – (479)
Emily Dickinson
- Demeter's Prayer to Hades
Rita Dove
- Mending Wall
Robert Frost
- Ode on a Grecian Urn
John Keats
- On Being Brought from Africa to America
Phillis Wheatley
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot
- The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
Ezra Pound
- Song of Myself (1892 version)
Walt Whitman
- Song VII (“My song has put off her adornments”)
Rabindranath Tagore