All posts in Poems

“When I feel down, I come back and laugh in joy.” 

This week we read a translated excerpt of Mario Benedetti’s poem No Te Rindas, or Don’t Give up. We’ve reached the time in the school year when students have to a lot of mandatory […]

I’m grateful for my beautiful life…

This week we read a beautiful poem called prayer by Jorge Argueta, where he expressed gratitude for may simple things we take for granted on a daily basis. Students worked on a brainstorm exercise […]

Where We’re From

Where we’re from is never just the geographic place we call home. This week, the high schoolers and 8th graders of MLA explored how place impacts their sense of self. After reading George Ella […]

Sounds We Hate, Sounds We Love (8th Grade)

We all have sounds we adore and sounds that make us cringe. The 8th graders of Clinton asked themselves what these sounds were for them before we read “Sweet Like a Crow” by Michael […]

Sounds We Hate, Sounds We Love (7th Grade)

We all have sounds we adore and sounds that make us cringe. The 7th graders of Clinton asked themselves what these sounds were for them before we read “Sweet Like a Crow” by Michael […]

A poem for those we admire

This week at Smyser Elementary, we learned about performance poetry and watched a poem by Sarah Kay titled “Mrs. Ribeiro.” Students learned about similes and practiced writing our own while thinking about a person […]

‘For once I feel like my life isn’t dirt cheap’: Poems of Routine and Repetition

We explored the powerful device of Repetition in Phil Kaye’s poem of the same name. Some poems in our workshop are ‘after’ Kaye’s work. Lesson Note: “Repetition can make magic happen- repeat a word or […]

Letters floating in the clouds

For their 15th week of poetry O-School students explored epistolary poems, poems that can be written in the style of letters. Letter writing is no longer as popular as it was in the past, […]

Revision, revisited

As all good writers know, revising is as important to the writing process as writing. Waters 6th graders went through a first round of revision some weeks back, so now they’re like old pros. […]

Cento of a Poem

For our last classes, I brought in a poem of my own, “The Saddest Ice Cube Tray Ever,” and fielded questions regarding what inspired it as well as choices made when drafting. As always, […]

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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