All posts in Poems

Dubois Dreamers

This week at Dubois, students read aloud from dream poems written by a third grader, Louise Driscoll, and Langston Hughes. Students considered the importance of having dreams: hopes and goals for themselves and others. […]

Spell Casting Poets

The 7th week of poetry was magical for Twain 6th graders. I asked students, if you could create a magical potion, what would you use it for and why? Most students wanted, unlimited riches […]

Read It and See It

Grissom’s poets never cease to impress me with their cleverness, and this week was no exception. After reading my poem wide-toothed and discussing what we noticed in the poem, students got to brainstorm about […]

Nature’s Calling

For their 4th week at Shoesmith students explored ideas about nature. Students were asked, Does nature have a voice? How does it communicate with us? Students came up with wonderful responses. We discussed the […]

We Imagine Our World…

If you had the power to change the world, what would you change? That’s the question we started off with this week with our Perez 4th graders, before reading Leslie Reese’s poem “Life Is […]

Things That Go Bump In The Night

This week our 4th graders at Perez explored all things Monsters. We started off our session by doing exquisite corpse drawings of monsters. Each table passed around their sheet of paper to everyone in […]

‘I did/a good job, and I stayed in the game/all day.’: Poems in the form of Letters

Students wrote epistolary poems in the form of letters, fashioned after basketball player Kobe Bryant’s poem, “Dear Basketball.” Lesson Note: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what […]

Diversity in Identity

For our 15th sessions, Swift 2nd graders reviewed what they remembered from last week when we watched a video of Janet S. Wong who talked about the value of handmade, handwritten, and well-thought-out gifts […]

Twain 5th graders begin to take hold of their dreams…

For our 3rd time meeting for poetry, Twain 5th graders shared some of their daydreams and sleeping dreams before we read 3 different poems about dreams: one by Annie C., a 3rd grader, one […]

‘with twigs and mud and worms for eating’: Video-Inspired Poems

Students watched a bear cam video similar to the one described in the poem we studied, ‘There was this bear cam’ by critic and poet Sandra Simonds. Sandra Simonds charts the formations and deformations […]

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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