All posts in Waters

What is Slam Poetry?

Hard to believe that last week was my penultimate week working with Waters’ 6th graders! For our last session, students didn’t do any writing. Instead we learned about slam poetry (born right here in […]

Ending with an Ars Poetica

As we prepare to wrap up the schoolyear at Waters, it felt fitting to end on the Ars Poetica. Ars Poeticas are poems about the craft of poetry – how it feels to write […]

Living on the Verge

One could argue that we’re always living in the midst of change. It’s true now and it was definitely true a quarter century (!!) ago, when we were on the verge of a new […]

Cutting Up: Collage Poems

Students used magazines to create cut-up or collage poems, using ‘found language’ and images to create new meaning. Contributors are: 7th and 8th Grade Students from Mrs. McClain’s Classroom: Piper M., Sloan L., Noah […]

Poems in Shapes

Greetings, greetings! For our most recent session with Waters 6th graders, we talked about the fun, surrealist concrete poems! We looked at a bunch of different examples before reading Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Social Distancing”. […]

‘What is 7th Grade?’: Blackout Poetry

Blackout Poetry:  A blackout poem is created when a poet takes a marker (usually black marker) to already established text–like that from a newspaper–and starts redacting words until a poem is formed or an […]

‘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 […]

Seeing the World in Color

For our last session with Waters’ 6th graders, color was on our minds! We listened to a lyric video for the Rolling Stones song “Pain It Black” and talked abut how black shows up […]

‘Because everyone has a right to…’ Because-style Poems

Students read Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s poem ‘Learning to Love America’ before they wrote their own ‘Because’ poems. Lesson Note: Born in Malacca, Malaysia, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim was raised by her Chinese father and attended […]

Self Portraits with Words

How do we paint a picture of ourselves with words? that’s the question that guided our last session at Waters elementary. First, students drew cartoon versions of themselves. Then, we read “Self Portrait” by […]

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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