All posts in Ola Faleti

Slam on the Last Day!

Our short and sweet residency with Jordan Elementary’s 6th graders came to an end last week. For this last day, students didn’t do any writing. We all learned about slam poetry (born right here […]

What is Slam Poetry?

Hard to believe that last week was my penultimate week working with Waters’ 6th graders! For our last session, students didn’t do any writing. Instead we learned about slam poetry (born right here in […]

Concrete Poetry

Hello hello! For my 5th week with Jordan’s 6th graders, we delved into the world of concrete poems, also known as shape poems. After students saw some engaging and graphically designed concrete poems, we […]

Ending with an Ars Poetica

As we prepare to wrap up the schoolyear at Waters, it felt fitting to end on the Ars Poetica. Ars Poeticas are poems about the craft of poetry – how it feels to write […]

The Places We Come From

For our last session at Jordan, 6th graders explored the people, places and things that represent where we come from. We opened up with an activity where students created their own paint chips based […]

Living on the Verge

One could argue that we’re always living in the midst of change. It’s true now and it was definitely true a quarter century (!!) ago, when we were on the verge of a new […]

Poems in Shapes

Greetings, greetings! For our most recent session with Waters 6th graders, we talked about the fun, surrealist concrete poems! We looked at a bunch of different examples before reading Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Social Distancing”. […]

Strong as a Raging Fire

For our third week at Jordan, 6th graders delved into the wonderful world of similes! First, we talked about what a simile is and students heard their classmates give examples (for instance, this soup […]

Finding Our People

During our second week of poetry at Jordan, we did some thinking about what it means to belong. To start, I had students work at their tables and come up with a list of […]

Seeing the World in Color

For our last session with Waters’ 6th graders, color was on our minds! We listened to a lyric video for the Rolling Stones song “Pain It Black” and talked abut how black shows up […]

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I’M FROM THE CITY LIGHTS / STREAMING OUT IN THE NIGHT / AND HUGE SKYSCRAPERS / TOWERING OVER THE LAKE – MELISSA E., 7TH GRADE POET