

Nothing Gold Can Stay Assignment: Student Response This is a long-standing association with the idea of “Mother Nature” providing sustenance to our world. Personification – referring to Nature as a female. This allusion shows how fleeting the perfect and the ideal are in our world. You may be shocked at how few of your students know what this allusion is talking about.



Here are some teaching ideas to use for this poem: Ask them to mark the rhyme scheme, any literary devices they recognize, and any words or phrases that jump out at them. If you have a DVD or sound recording of “The Outsiders,” you can play that part of the reading for the students. Because the poem is so short, and the devices are fairly easy to recognize, this is a great poem to use with middle schoolers when starting to teach about annotating literature. Make sure that every student has a copy of the poem for annotation purposes. You could also have them write this as a journal entry before moving into a discussion of “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Bring On the Poem Ask them to make a list of the things they like most about the first part of the day. As the students come in, ask them to close their eyes and think about the first thing they do in the morning, or what it feels like to wake up. In the background, I would suggest some light classical music. If you have an overhead projector, if you could get a color slide of a picture of sunrise, that would be helpful too. If you have a multimedia projector, a slideshow of some images of sunrise, trees, animals, and other plants would be a great mood-setter. As students come into the classroom on the day of your unit over Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” have some of the lights dimmed, or half of your lights turned off.
