All posts in Swift

Final Poetry Party

We had our final poetry party today. It was so hard to say goodbye but we had so much fun! We passed out our final poetry books that we’ve been working so hard on […]

Poetry Publishing: Part 2

Today, I made a visit to Swift to work with small groups on their revisions for their final poems in our poetry books. We had a great time being able to work in a […]

Poetry Publishing

Today we started working toward our final poetry books! We got to choose a poem that we love to continue working on. We talked together about our goals, including using shorter lines to make […]

“Pencils are wild, magical, and so cool”

On the last day of our 2nd grade poetry residency at Swift – we looked at Carl Sandburg‘s poem “Pencils,” in which I omitted a number of words and lines. Students came up with […]

“Dark and light both fill the page…”

Last Friday Swift 2nd graders began with a chat about things that are small enough to fit in one’s pocket, such as coins, crumbs, pieces of candy, and folded up pieces of paper. We […]

“Over the moon…”

Last week Swift 2nd graders performed collaborative poetry and music in a special morning assembly for family and community as part of the school’s partnership with Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I was very moved to […]

Summertime! (3rd grade)

As the weather changes and things start to warm up, it felt like the perfect time to read “Knoxville, TN” by Nikki Giovanni. We watched a video of her reading the poem from Knoxville […]

Dada!

Today, we explored Dada poetry. We talked about how Dada artists were dealing with a world at war and post-pandemic and how they decided art should be random and meaningless. We discussed whether or […]

Summertime (2nd grade!)

I got to make a special visit to the 2nd grade today. They’ve clearly had an amazing teacher with Ms. Leslie and they were very enthusiastic about poetry. We read Nikki Giovanni’s “Knoxville, TN” […]

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 […]

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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