All posts in Poetry

‘…Casper the Ghost playing with me’: Poems on Age and Reflection

Students shared childhood stories before writing their own poems reflecting back on their younger selves, as the speaker did in Billy Collin’s poem, On Turning Ten. Lesson Note. “I think one of the strengths […]

‘and dad/ and mom/and people/ and pool/’: Food and Memory Poems

Nikki Giovanni is a well-known African-American poet who spent summers with her grandparents in Knoxville, Tennessee, when she was a little girl, doing many of the same things kids like to do during the […]

‘The Whee-who/ The waves/ The quiet/ The stir/ Wow.’: Poems on Age and Reflection

Students read and discussed Billy Collin’s poem, ‘On Turning Ten,’ before writing their own poems on the subject of age and nostalgia. Lesson Note: “When you put something out there onto a piece of […]

‘Then put red tomatoes in’: Food & Memory Poems

A discussion of food and memory began our class in preparation to study Gary Soto’s Narrative Style poem, Oranges. Nostalgia and feelings came up a lot in our talks. What emotions are attached to […]

‘When I go to the water …’: Exquisite Corpse-Style Group Poems

Working on poetic lines, students crafted visual and then poetic Exquisite Corpses! Afterward, they were challenged to create a clay figure of one of their collective group drawings! Below are some images and some […]

‘I remember how I always somewhow’: Food & Memory Poems

A discussion of food and memory began our class in preparation for studying Gary Soto’s narrative-style poem, Oranges. Nostalgia and feelings came up a lot in our talks. What emotions are attached to memory […]

Big Ideas

At the start of the week, we were thinking small; later in the week, we were thinking big! The 4th graders read Before the Rains by Kim Stafford and then wrote poems envisioning the […]

The Little Things!

At the start of this week, the 4th graders at Dulles Elementary took some time to appreciate the little things, with Ode to Marbles by Max Mendelsohn. We talked about some examples of small […]

Life is Full of Suprises!

This week at Smyser, just before the break, The 4th-graders looked at a poem that has a surprising ending, which is emphasized by the final line break. I reviewed what we’ve been learning about […]

Writing About our Pets

When I visited Ms. Tze’s 4th-grade class at Dulles, we first spent some time getting to know each other with a name game, then I heard from them what they’d been learning so far […]

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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