All posts in Ola Faleti

Once I was funny like really funny: self-portrait poems

For this 13th week with Waters 7th graders, we explored the self-portrait poem. How do we paint ourselves? Mary Jo Bang’s self portrait poem paints a pretty odd, confusing version of herself. We talked […]

Instructions: Grow up to be troublemaker with hair as gold as wheat

For our lucky 13th poetry session with Waters 6th graders, we talked about instructions – why does one give them? What makes for good ones? We opened with an activity where a few students […]

the opposite of me – Persona poems

For our 12th week with Waters 7th graders, we explored Persona poems. These are poems written in the voice of someone else. For this lesson we discussed examples of celeb personas (like Beyonce/Sasha Fierce, […]

I should be me – Persona poems

For our 12th week with Waters 6th graders, we explored Persona Poems. These are poems written in the voice of someone else. For this lesson we read one of my poems (!!) titled “Lavender” […]

why isn’t it baseball season already? Letter Poems

For the 11th session with Waters 6th graders, we looked at letter poems, also known as epistolary poems. Students thought about figures they would talk to if they could (living or dead, fictional or […]

stop what you are doing – Instruction poems

Why do we give instructions and whom do we give them to? These are the questions that anchored this 11th week with Waters 7th graders. We read Dana Levin’s “Instructions for Stopping” and tried […]

Collage poems

Poetry and collage aren’t so far removed! Water’s 7th graders explored the intersection of the two by looking at examples from artists like Krista Franklin and Marcus Dawson. Then students created their own collage […]

most things are beautiful firecrackers

For our most recent session with Waters 6th graders, we delved into erasure poems, also known as blackout poems. After looking at a variety of examples, each student received an excerpt from Sandra Cisneros’ […]

A picture is worth infinite words

Beautiful magic can be made when words and images collide. For that reason, Waters 7th graders dove into the world of Ekphrastic Poetry. Ekphrastic poems are written in response to an image, often a […]

A picture is worth ______ words…

Beautiful magic can be made when words and images collide. For that reason, Waters 6th graders dove into the world of Ekphrastic Poetry. Ekphrastic poems are written in response to an image, often a […]

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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