All posts in Waters

Cutting Up! Collage Poems

Students used magazines and created cut-up poems! They used ‘found language’ and images to create new meaning.  Lesson Note: Creative Artist guru Julia Cameron says the part of us who create art is about […]

‘When I was 5 /my parents gave me the choice…: Choose Your Own Adventure Poems

Students were instructed to grab a book and find words and passages that stood out to them, or to use random words as the starting point for a poem. They were then instructed to […]

A day to celebrate

The first Friday in May commemorated the end of my 6th and 7th grade residencies at Waters Elementary…how fast a school year flies by. 7th graders celebrated by writing a class exquisite corpse poem […]

‘Then repeat with essence’: Instruction Poems

Students read Dana Levin’s poem, ‘Instructions for Stopping,’ and then crafted their instruction-based poems! Lesson Note: Instruction poems offer a unique blend of creativity and utility. They can be memorable and engaging ways to convey information, […]

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 […]

One more revision round!

How quickly 20 weeks flies by! We’ve come close to the end (!) of poetry sessions for Water’s 7th graders. They’ve already proven to be experienced revisers of their writing, and we’re wrapping up […]

“pero tu luz como un ángel no se esconde entre la frazada oscuridad “: Star Poems

Students read a student poem that uses personification to talk to a star before trying their hands at their poems addressing something… bigger than themselves, using words from legendary poet/teacher Kim Addonizio’s word bank […]

New Personas “pulled out of / a pile of all my / paper friends”

For our penultimate workshop, students in Ms. Smallwood and Ms. Hernandez’s classes wrote poems from the point of view of people, animals, and things other than themselves. To get us started, we read “According […]

‘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 […]

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. […]

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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