All posts in Poems

I am… (8th Grade)

Metaphors allow us to transform ourselves, if just for a moment. The 8th graders of Clinton asked themselves what they could become after we read “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” by N. Scott Momaday. […]

Ode to the Artist

At Social Justice High School, we read and watched Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem “Ode to Biggie Smalls Ending in Gold.” We discussed odes, musicians/artists and their larger cultural impact, and spent time writing our own […]

Food Memories

Many of our 5 senses are deeply connected to memory. This week the students of MLA reflected on their favorite foods and the people, places, and things connected to them. After reading “The Tropics […]

Life the Storm, the Rollercoaster, the River

This past Monday Lawndale explored the meaning of life in metaphors. We did an activity called “the river of life” where students mapped out their lives up to this point using the image of […]

I’ll have two scoops of vanilla clouds, please!

The day of our second sessions was “Wacky Wig Wednesday” and some teachers surprised their students – and me – by showing up with zany tresses!😁 Nettelhorst 2nd graders got down to the business […]

“My skin is caramel…”

Last week, for our fourth sessions, Brennemann 2nd graders tried to imagine worlds in which only one color was present, like a world in which everything is red, or gray. We tried to pair […]

Revision Party

We had an excellent time today revising! We’ve been working so hard on our poems and it was a great opportunity to look through the poems we’ve written and think about which ones we […]

I’ve got the school blues

For their sixteenth week of poetry O-School students explored Spoken Word poetry. Spoken Word poems are made for the stage, its storytelling told through elements of rhythm, rhyme, repetition, and even hip-hop. Most students […]

Dear Artist…

This week at Henry Elementary, we watched and read Joshua Bennett’s poem “Dear Stevie.” We learned about epistle poetry and wrote poems in letter form to our favorite musicians (or authors or sports teams)! […]

Poetry is Perfect: Ars Poeticas

Last week marked our last week writing poem with Waters 6th graders. In our many weeks together, students learned about poetry in its many, many forms and wrote dozens of thoughtful, heartfelt, and funny […]

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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