All posts in Poems

Do you love sour pickles?

Valentines Day landed on my most recent sessions with Swift 2nd graders, so we read Eloise Greenfield’s poem, “Honey, I Love.” Students enjoyed lines in which the poet said she LOVED “a flying pool” […]

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’ […]

Poems (with footnotes)

This week Water’s 6th and 7th graders in Ms. Smallwood and Ms. Hernandez’ classes read “Thank you Letter (with footnotes)” by John Grandits. In class we discussed creating double meanings in our writing and […]

‘Ask me about what my wonderful family does and i will tell:’ Abecedarians

Students wrote “Abecedarian” poems that use the entire alphabet as the lefthand spine of the poem. Lesson Note: “My essential poetics is simply to be doing something, making something, playing, struggling, learning something – […]

“I capture every moment…”

In Mrs. Siciliano’s 7th+8th grade class, we looked at “Sorrow Is Not My Name” by Ross Gay. Through the exploration of similes and metaphors, we learned about holding the complexity of things being both […]

Emotion Machines

If your sadness was a machine how would it work? This week we started off by exploring Ada Limon’s poem “The Quiet Machine”. In it Limon uses the structure of a prose poem to […]

‘Something on my mind…” Simile Poems

Students read Mike Taylor’s poem, ‘Thinking About You,’ and experimented with rhyming, exploring their daydreams and creating similes. Lesson Note: “I learned that the only way to get a thing done is to start […]

Choosing our Stories

In our first meeting at Social Justice High School in the after school program, we shared a poem by Tonya Ingram titled, “I am 22.” In this poem, Tonya shares about herself, her diagnosis […]

“I am a force, a legend, an echo”

This week, Hyde Park’s poets discussed big egos and big statements. Using Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Ego Tripping,” we explored the power of hyperbole and what it means to overcome and bet on yourself. These […]

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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