We’re on a Mission 🚀 Help Support Poetry Programs for over 2,500 students! As we head towards the end of the calendar year, and launch our annual campaign, the Chicago Poetry Center team is […]

In our pantoums studies, our poets wrote some free poems based on the structure or about ideas that came up during brainstorming. Please enjoy some extra poetry from South Loop Poetry Club! South Loop […]

For the past two weeks at South Loop Poetry Club, our poets have been working hard to write pantoums! I shared an example of a pantoum I wrote, and explained the pattern of repeating […]

Grissom’s 6th and 7th grade students are no strangers to expressing their love, as I was lucky enough to learn last week. Students spent some time watching Rudy Fransisco’s “If I Was A Love […]

Students read the poem, ‘Metaphors’ by Sylvia Plath, and then wrote their own metaphor-based poems. “Metaphors” by Sylvia Plath I’m a riddle in nine syllables,An elephant, a ponderous house,A melon strolling on two tendrils.O […]

This post is a throwback to some poems Sayre’s 8th graders wrote about their pet peeves. After reading “Flexers” by Sabrina Y., students wrote their own poems about icks they have. Check out a […]

For our 4th week of poetry, Hamline 6th graders focused on their emotions. I asked students to pick an emoji that described how they felt that morning. There were six emojis: 😐🙂🥰😠😞😂to choose from. […]

Persona Poems are an exploratory of another person’s psyche, and allow us to imagine being someone else for a while. For this session, Waters students read one of my poems (!) titled “Lavender,” heavily […]

Our 10th sessions at Swift landed on the last Friday before spring break, and everyone seemed to be counting down the hours before it began. 2nd graders had been on a field trip to […]

When is the right time to do something? How do you know it’s the right time? These are the questions Twain 6th graders thought about for their first poetry session on Monday. Together we […]

Students studied “Manhunt or Ode to First Kisses” by Elizabeth Acevedo. Asking themselves, how can poetry capture that wishing, yearning, hungering we know from being a little kid? As a class, we focused on […]

Happy Spring Break, reader! Last week, Sayre’s students dove a little deeper into figurative language with metaphors. We spent some time reading Philip B. Williams’ “Declaration” and discussing the parts of the city we […]

For our third poetry lesson, we focused on concrete (visual) poetry. This form of poetry is where the words on the page form the shape of the thing that the poem is about. After […]

For our third poetry lesson, we focused on concrete (visual) poetry. This form of poetry is where the words on the page form the shape of the thing that the poem is about. After […]

Hello again! Last week, Grissom’s poets got real about what poetry means to them. After watching a video of Jamila Wood’s “Blk Girl Art,” we discussed feelings we associate with reading poetry. Students were […]

This week our 7th graders read Ada Limon’s The Quiet Machine. This prose poem by the 2022 U.S. Poet Laureate, describes all of the different kinds of quiet she experiences, based on her state […]

What animal do you feel like on Mondays? How is a Friday different than a Tuesday and why? This week in Ms. Murray’s 4th grade class we read Francisco Alarcon’s On Monday I Feel […]

Students talked about and then wrote poems about emotions using personification. Lesson Note: “Developing creativity in students is not a luxury.” How Social-Emotional Imagination Facilitates Deep Learning and Creativity in the Classroom  Gotlieb, Jahner, […]

The weather outside school walls happened to be warm and springlike, contrasting with the scene set in Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Arguably, the opposite environment intensified its […]

            The Chicago Poetry Center presents BLUE HOUR, a free, public monthly in-person reading series and generative writing workshop hosted and facilitated by Marty McConnell.  The Blue Hour reading includes […]

Spring definitely made an appearance in Springfield last Monday on March 11th. The sun was shining, the weather was warm and breezy, the ideal day for the Poetry Out Loud 2024 Illinois State Competition. […]

We took a look at Richard Blanco’s prose/mix/hybrid poem about missed destinations, We Are Not Going to Malta. Students were then given travel brochures exhibiting lush locales (decidedly not always depicting reality), and asked to […]

Hamline 6th graders traveled back in time for their third week of poetry. We explored how to use our five senses (touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight) to recall memories. I showed students photos […]

Swift students continued with more out-of-the-box thinking, turning to cooking-up recipes for everything but food! Despite being tired from testing and being ready for the weekend to begin, students still managed to read and […]

This week the young vikings explored blackout poems and centos. They read excerpts from Austin Klein’s Newspaper Blackouts and Chicago poet Simone Muench’s “Wolf Cento.” The students were then given back issues of Chicago […]

When we worked on thinking out-of-the-box and “Swan of Bees” poems a few weeks ago, I was so impressed by how students worked that it was difficult to choose only a few poems to […]

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“Writing poetry makes me feel like I can see myself, like I can see my reflection, but not in a mirror, in the world. I write and I know I can be reflected.”
-Oscar S.

“Writing poetry makes me feel free.”
-Buenda D.

“Writing poetry is like your best friend.”
-Jessica M.

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