This week we read "Song for the pockets" by the California poet Gary Soto. This list poem creates an image of a person by enumerating the things in his or her pockets. The poet's careful word choices and personification of objects evoked many possible events. A "key whose door was burned", "harmonica grinning with rust" and "a rattle of seeds capsuled in foil" suggested to them a burned down house, music, and a garden to be planted sometime in the future.

This week Shields students took their inspiration from three short by two authors Carl Sandburg and Richard Brautigan. Students and I discussed how the poems worked so economically while at the same time expressing subtle things about our surroundings and thought processes. Sandburg's famous metaphor "the fog comes/ on little cat feet" in the poem "Fog" is echoed and teased at By Brautigan's "A Correction" in which he tells the older poet "Cats walk on little cat feet/ and fogs walk on little fogs feet, / Carl".

Despite the imminent threat of a crackly microphone cable—which was temporarily fixed on the fly by Mr. Mendoza—student poets from my three rooms, as well as poets from Ms. Murphy's four other classes participating in the 2009-2010 Hands on Stanzas residency gathered this morning in the gymnasium to share poems written over the last year with their fellow poets. Also in attendance were 4th graders, as well as parents, teachers, and faculty members.

CHICAGO — The Hands on Stanzas City Wide Reading was held April 28th, at the Ballroom of the School of the Art Institute in downtown Chicago. Among the fifteen schools participating in the program this year was James Shields Elementary. Two students from Shields were chosen to read during this gala event: Cynthia M., Student Representative picked by Poet-In-Residence, Larry O. Dean; and Laura D., Runner Up in the Robinson Jeffers/Big Read Contest.