Because of the intense nature of their work and the topic, I chose not to be as strict as I would have with another subject. If their poem expressed that "aha" moment that both the student and I recognized and did not have distracting problems, I considered their poem complete.

Another consideration in planning the unit was to decide what was and was not appropriate for the content of their poems as well as mechanical hints. I decided on the following list of guidelines: (1. Poems could not be about perpetrators or Nazi symbols, (2. Graphic or gory images could not be used (3. Students could not write as a victim. They could respond to a victim or write as a personification of an artifact. 4) And, of course, mechanics issues such as not trying to rhyme, not repeating words except for special effects, had to be considered. During each lesson, an example of a poem for the pattern being used was modeled based on a topic other than the Holocaust so as not to influence their images.

Since I wanted the main emphasis of the poetry to be responding to a person or an image, I used both fictional and non-fictional writings as well as visual images to generate ideas. The first few lessons involved the play version of Anne Frank which is in our literature anthology and is required reading in our system as well as selections from the complete Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. I wanted to stress two things in responding to these works. First I wanted the students to respond to one of the characters to demonstrate that they had really connected with and internalized some of the characteristics of that person as much as possible by reading about them. For this I used a prepositional phrase pattern. This pattern consisted of eight lines, each of which had to be a prepositional phrase. The title did not have to be a phrase. This was one of the most constrictive patterns. They were not allowed to repeat a preposition (get those English books out!), and it was also difficult to avoid rambling. The students had to learn that each line had to lead to the next line in a meaningful way and that there had to be a turn in about the fifth or sixth line to get the "aha" moment. This is, of course, very subtle and the students struggled with understanding how to accomplish this in the beginning.