Teach This Poem: “Here’s a Little Mouse” by E. E. Cummings

The following activities and questions are designed to help your students use their noticing skills to move through the poem and develop their thinking skills so they understand its meaning with confidence, using what they’ve noticed as evidence for their interpretations. Read more about the framework upon which these activities are based.

1. Warm-up: Look at these different illustrations of mice. What stands out to you in each image? Why? What do these images together make you think about or what questions do you have?  

2. Before Reading the Poem: (Teachers, before class, turn this poem into a paragraph with no line breaks, stanzas, capitalization, or punctuation. Make enough copies for your class.) Work with a partner or small group to read the text and rewrite it by turning it into a poem. If you have the space, write it on a poster or large sheet of paper. Feel free to use line breaks, stanzas, capitalization, punctuation, etc. to make your poem come alive. What creative choices can you make? What words, phrases, or lines need more emphasis? Why? Share your version of the poem with the class and why you made the poetic choices you did. What do you notice about these different poems? What creative choices stand out to you? 

3. Reading the Poem: Silently read the poem “Here’s a Little Mouse” by E. E. Cummings. What do you notice about the poem? Note any words or phrases that stand out to you or any questions you might have.

4. Listening to the Poem: Enlist two volunteers and listen as the poem is read aloud twice. Write down any additional words and phrases that stand out to you. You can listen to a reading of the poem.

5. Small Group Discussion: Share what you noticed about the poem with a small group of students. Based on the details you just shared with your small group and the resources from the beginning of class, how does the published version of the poem compare to the versions from the beginning of class. What creative choices does the poet make with line breaks, stanzas, capitalization, and/or punctuation? How do these choices impact your reading of the poem? Why? 

6. Whole Class Discussion: Join with the same partner or small group from earlier. Together, choose one of the four stanzas in the poem. How is this stanza important to the poem? What choices does the poet make in this particular stanza, and how might the poem be different without these choices? 

7. Extension for Grades 7-8: Write your own poem that utilizes line breaks, stanzas, capitalization, and/or punctuation in unique ways. You can also use this library of botanical and animal illustrations. Share your poem with the class and write a short paragraph about what poetic choices you made and why. (Teachers, you might want to make a gallery walk or class anthology of these poems.)

8. Extension for Grades 9-12: Learn about the Modernist movement in poetry, and read more poems from the movement. Create a class anthology of Modernist poems. For each poem that you add, write a brief paragraph about the artistic choices that the poet made. Share the poem you included, as well as your paragraph with the class. Discuss what you learned about Modernism and how it relates to the world today. 

In her blogpost “How to Neutralize Haters: E. E. Cummings, Creative Courage, and the Importance of Protecting the Artist’s Right to Challenge the Status Quo,” writer Maria Popova discusses the aesthetic rebelliousness of E. E. Cummings and the importance of protecting artists’ right to “challenge the status quo.” Using letters and photos from the Academy of American Poets’ archive, Popova goes into the history behind the Academy granting Cummings the prestigious Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1950 and some of the subsequent backlash that occurred. Read more.

Enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause across a poetic line break.