All posts in Waters

Writing You a Letter…

Hello hello! Last week, Waters students explored the ever-relevant epistolary poem. Epistolary poems are poems in letter form. We read “Another Night at Sea Level” by Meg Day, a poem rich with imagery […]

‘Coming Home’: A Lesson in Metaphor & Values

Students read Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Metaphors’ and then wrote their own metaphor-based poems. They also did some free writing around the topic of Values that you will see here. Lesson Note: Mrs. McClain, 7th […]

‘we go in rows/ do as told’: Gwendolyn Brooks Imitations

Students read Gwendolyn Brooks’ classic poem, ‘We Real Cool’ before crafting their own ‘cool’ poems using their own words and ideas for what is cool, rhyme repetition, and the short form. We Real Cool […]

The Art of Revision

All the best poets know that the real poetry comes with revision. So it felt fitting that for our halfway point, Waters poets revised old or recently-written poems. First we talked about food, and […]

Making Poems out of Poems

It’s hard to believe we’re near the halfway point of our Waters residency, but we are! For the ninth week, we talked about erasure poems, also known as blackout poems. I found out that […]

‘people calm as an empty hospital’: Simile Poems

Students talked about similes before reading Mike Taylor’s poem filled with the same! Here is some of the writing that resulted from that exercise! Lesson Note: “Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even […]

A Picture is Worth ______ Words

As the old saying goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words….and writers of ekphrastic poetry would probably agree! Ekphrastic poems are poems written in response to an image, often a work of art. So for […]

‘Throw Abraham Lincoln’s hat in…’: Potion and Recipe Poems

Students read ‘Truth Serum’ by Naomi Shihab Nye before penning their own potion and recipe poems. Students discussed TRUTH, LIES and how both can sometimes hurt and often STINK to high heaven! Lesson Note: […]

‘You have to put water in it:’ Name Poems

‘I celebrate and sing myself…’-Walt Whitman. Students explored names through a series of prompts, which began with reading the poem, ‘a girl named jack’ by Jaqueline Woodson. What occurs in the naming of someone […]

Home Is What We Eat

Hello, poetry lovers 🙂 I believe it’s important to bring what’s happening in the greater world into the classroom. In a lesson largely inspired by Stuti Sharma, this week we talked about what students […]

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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