Remember

by Joy Harjo

In this picture-book adaptation of her poem, Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo invites readers to remember their connections to the sky, earth, plants, animals, family, and one another. Michaela Goade’s illustrations extend the poem’s sense of wonder, making this a lyrical read-aloud about identity, belonging, and attention to the living world.

Big Idea

Remembering means recognizing the relationships that shape us and caring for the world we share. Writers can use repetition, vivid images, and deliberate pauses to help readers experience those connections.

Discussion Questions

1.Why might Harjo ask us to remember things we can see every day, such as the sky, sun, and plants?
2.Which connection in the poem feels especially important to you, and what makes it meaningful?
3.How do Goade’s illustrations help you notice connections that you might not notice from the words alone?
4.How does hearing the word “Remember” again and again change the way you listen or feel?
5.What would you invite someone to remember about a place, person, or living thing you care about?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 45 minutes📦 A copy of Remember, chart paper, drawing paper, pencils, crayons or colored pencils, sticky notes, and a stapler or binder clips

Learning Goals

Identify connections among people, other living things, and the natural world in the poem and illustrations.
Explain how repetition, descriptive language, and pauses influence a poem’s meaning and pace.
Compose and illustrate an original poetic invitation grounded in a specific observation or meaningful connection.
Read or perform a short poem with intentional phrasing and listen respectfully to classmates’ interpretations.

Activity Steps

1.Introduce Joy Harjo as a Mvskoke poet and Michaela Goade as a Tlingit illustrator. Explain that this is a poem in picture-book form, not a conventional problem-and-solution story; read it aloud once for enjoyment.
2.Revisit selected spreads. Ask students to identify connections among people, sky, earth, plants, and animals, and chart their observations using words or quick sketches.
3.Read one short passage twice, first quickly and then with thoughtful pauses. Discuss what changes, and model an original line such as “Remember the puddle that holds a piece of sky.”
4.Invite students to sketch a connection they choose and compose one or two original “Remember” lines. K–1 students may dictate or label drawings; grades 2–5 can add sensory details and experiment with line breaks. Personal family information is optional.
5.Have partners rehearse reading their pages, marking a pause with a slash on a practice copy. Partners describe one image they could imagine and one place where the pause helped them listen.
6.Arrange the pages into a class poem that moves from nearby connections to the wider world. Perform it together and close with a brief reflection on how the words, pictures, and pacing work together.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RL.K.1 and RL.1.1 — Ask and answer questions about key details, with appropriate support.
ELA: CCSS RL.1.4 and RL.2.4 — Explore language that suggests feelings, appeals to the senses, and supplies rhythm and meaning in poems.
ELA: CCSS SL.K.1–SL.5.1 — Participate in collaborative conversations and build on others’ ideas, with grade-appropriate expectations.
Art: Visual literacy — Explain how illustrations communicate relationships and contribute to meaning.
SEL: Self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship skills — Reflect on belonging and listen respectfully to different experiences.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

Remember teaches pacing through attention rather than action. Instead of following a character through a conventional plot, readers move among images of sky, family, earth, and other living beings. Harjo’s recurring invitation to remember gives the poem a recognizable pulse, while shifts in image and scale keep that repetition from feeling static. In a Pace-Write-Read study, students can hear how a writer makes room for thought: an important image may need a slower voice, a breath, or a moment of looking. Study the picture-book adaptation as a collaboration between Harjo’s language and Goade’s visual storytelling. Read selected passages aloud while students consider where their voices naturally pause, then examine how the spread and page turn influence that experience. Identify Harjo and Goade as artists from distinct Native nations rather than treating the book as a statement of one universal Indigenous worldview. Students can learn from the poem’s craft by writing from their own observations and relationships, without inventing Native teachings or copying cultural imagery.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
Pacing	Notice how the repeated invitation to remember encourages a reflective tempo rather than a race toward an ending. Read a short passage at two speeds and ask which allows its images and connections to register.
Plot	Explain that this poem develops through connected ideas rather than a central conflict and resolution. Map its movement among the natural world, human relationships, and belonging instead of forcing it onto a conventional plot diagram.
Prosody	Model how emphasis, pitch, and phrasing change the invitation carried by “Remember.” Students can try a gentle and an emphatic reading, then explain what each makes them hear.
Word	Study the familiar words for sky, moon, sun, and earth and discuss how their relationships give them weight. Ask students to choose one precise everyday word for their own poem rather than relying on elaborate vocabulary.
Concept	Explore how remembering can mean recognizing a connection, not just recalling a past event. Invite students to distinguish something they remember happening from something they want to keep in mind.
Voice & Worldview	Notice the speaker’s direct, caring voice and emphasis on relationships among people and the living world. Situate this poem in Harjo’s work as a Mvskoke poet without suggesting she speaks for all Native people.
Point of View	The speaker addresses a “you,” drawing the listener into the poem. Compare an original sentence beginning “I notice” with one beginning “Remember” to hear how direct address changes the reader’s role.
Setting & Place	The poem moves across places and scales rather than staying in one setting. Follow references to sky, earth, and living things, then invite students to write about a place they know closely.
Original Characters	There is no single named protagonist driving a conventional adventure; the listener and the beings addressed or evoked carry the poem’s attention. Discuss how the sun, moon, and other parts of the world receive presence without treating them as interchangeable fictional sidekicks.
Dialogue	The poem does not rely on conversations between characters. Explore how directly addressing the listener still creates a feeling of communication, and let students respond orally to one invitation.
Details	Look at how a particular detail, such as the sun’s birth at dawn, gives a broad idea a specific focus. Students can replace “Remember nature” with an observation they could actually see, hear, or feel.
Descriptions	Notice how Harjo’s concise descriptions suggest more than they explain. Ask students to describe one natural image in a short phrase and let an illustration supply additional detail.
Firsts	Examine how the opening invitation immediately establishes both the poem’s subject and its repeating pattern. Have students write an opening line that introduces an image and makes a listener want to attend.
Immediacy & Engagement	Direct address makes the poem feel personally relevant even when its images are vast. Ask students which invitation reaches them most immediately and what experience helps them connect to it.
Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Distinguish an image or moment of attention from a fully developed story scene. Track how the poem accumulates connected invitations rather than alternating conventional action scenes and summaries.
Tension / Suspense / Surprise	The book generates curiosity about the next connection rather than suspense about danger or conflict. Invite students to notice an unexpected relationship or a shift from something immense to something intimate.
Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Remembering is central, but that does not make every line a narrative flashback. Contrast the poem’s references to origins and ongoing relationships with a story that dramatizes a specific earlier event; do not impose cliffhangers where none are needed.
Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	This picture book uses spreads and page turns rather than chapters. Pause before a turn and ask how the next image continues, expands, or redirects the invitation to remember.
Pace & Creativity	Show how a repeated opening can free a writer to invent varied images. Students can keep “Remember” constant while changing the length, detail, and placement of the words that follow.
Play	Invite playful shifts of scale, moving from a tiny seed to a wide sky in students’ own writing. Keep the play grounded in attentive observation and respectful engagement with the poem.
Performance	Try a shared reading in which the class speaks the recurring invitation and volunteers read the surrounding language. Leave time to look at Goade’s illustrations so the performance does not outrun the book.
Personality	Ask what qualities students hear in the speaker’s voice, such as warmth, confidence, or wonder, and request evidence. Help students distinguish the poem’s speaking voice from assumptions about the author’s whole personality.
Humor	Humor is not the poem’s main engine; its dominant effects are reflection and wonder. Discuss how writing can hold an audience without jokes, while allowing students’ own poems to include genuine moments of gentle delight.
Pause	After an image of sky, dawn, or earth, leave a brief silence and ask what students pictured. Teach silence as room for meaning rather than simply an interruption in reading.
Poetry / Poetic Devices	Explore direct address, repeated beginnings, imagery, and personification, including the moon’s presentation as someone to know. K–1 students can describe what the words make them imagine; older students can name the devices and explain their effects.
Repetition	Identify the repeated “Remember” openings as a pattern that links different subjects. Older students can learn the term anaphora and discuss how each new invitation adds meaning.
Rhythm	Listen for the rhythm of spoken phrases rather than searching for a fixed beat or rhyme scheme. Compare a shorter invitation with a longer one to notice how breath and sentence length affect movement.
Punctuation	Examine punctuation in a selected passage and distinguish a sentence ending from a visual line break. Let meaning and punctuation guide phrasing rather than stopping equally at every printed line.
Questions	Although invitations rather than questions organize the poem, they prompt inquiry about identity and relationship. Ask students to turn one invitation into an open question and discuss how the effect changes.
Compare-Contrast	Compare the poem’s attention to celestial bodies with its attention to human and earthly relationships. Ask how these differ in scale yet contribute to the same sense of connection.
Objects	Discuss how things readers might treat as background become worthy of sustained attention. Encourage students to name a particular stone, leaf, or other familiar thing and explain its relationship to their lives.
Threes	Use the opening attention to sky, moon, and sun to explore how readers can hear a three-part grouping. Invite students to try three connected images without claiming that the whole poem follows a rule of three.
Lists	The accumulating invitations create a list-like structure with emotional and conceptual connections. Ask students to order three original lines intentionally rather than treating their sequence as random.
White Space & Negative Space	Examine how the room around text and the less crowded areas of selected illustrations influence where the eye rests. Students can test whether extra space around an important line encourages a slower reading.
Art & Graphics	Study how Goade’s color, scale, and composition extend the relationships named by Harjo. Ask students to support an interpretation with a specific visual detail rather than assuming each image merely repeats the words.
Interactives & Gamification	The book does not require game mechanics; any interactive routine is a teaching addition. Try a cooperative connection search in which students find a word-image relationship and explain it, without rewarding speed.
Placement	Notice where text sits in relation to figures, landscape, and open space on a chosen spread. Students can place the same original line in two locations on a drawing and compare the reading paths.
Form	Identify the work as a free-verse poem adapted into picture-book form. Discuss how spoken language, printed text, illustrations, and page turns contribute different kinds of pacing.
Dummy	Explain that a dummy is a rough model used to plan a picture book. Students can fold a small booklet and distribute three original invitations across its pages, testing how each turn changes the experience.
Passion	Ask what the poem’s repeated attention suggests the speaker deeply values. Invite students to write about a connection they genuinely care about, without requiring private disclosures or imitation of Harjo’s cultural perspective.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute task: Three Invitations, Three Breaths. Minutes 0–3: Revisit the opening movement through sky, moon, and sun, listening for the recurring invitation and the time each image needs. Minutes 3–6: Model three original lines about a familiar place, such as “Remember the courtyard tree. / Remember its shade across our shoes. / Remember the birds we stop to hear.” Read them once hurriedly and once with meaningful pauses. Minutes 6–11: Students write three original “Remember” lines connecting something nearby with the wider living world; younger students may draw and dictate. Minutes 11–15: Students divide a page into three panels, place one line or dictated phrase in each, and add quick illustrations. Minutes 15–18: Partners read the panels aloud, using a finger tap to mark a planned pause, and revise one word, line break, or placement to improve the pace. Minutes 18–20: Invite two or three readings and ask everyone to complete the reflection, “My pause helps the listener notice ___.” Emphasize that students are borrowing a writing technique, not reproducing Native cultural teachings.

Classroom Activities

Remember Our Shared World

Students create an illustrated class poem inspired by Harjo’s invitations to notice and remember. Each child contributes an original “Remember” line about a meaningful connection—to a place, a trusted person, a plant, an animal, or the wider world—and uses visual spacing and a planned pause to shape how the line is read aloud.

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