It has been such a tremendous pleasure to work with the 3rd grade students of Moos Elementary this school year. Ms. Santiago's and Ms. Becker's classes are groups of smart, funny, warm, respectful and creative friends, who do a great job of expressing their ideas, and of supporting each other in doing so. I'm honored to have gotten to work with them. For our last assignment this week, I brought the students a very playful, whimsical poem, which continues our final exploration of writing poetry about imagined worlds.

Baring down on the end of this year's Hands on Stanza's program, the students and I turn our focus towards the imagined world, and strive to give as much clarity and description to our spontaneous ideas and visions, as we have given to patiently describing our inner and outter worlds. This week's poem, Your Catfish Friend, by Richard Braughtigan, inspired us to play with the Magic "If", and to imagine what we might do or want, if we were someone-- or something-- else entirely. Please enjoy these whimsical, creative poems!

Ms. Santiago's class:

The Ghost
by Jenifer A.

Our production went off without a hitch! It was a team effort to be sure and all in all a wonderful performance.
It was so exciting to be at Timeline Theater where their alley style stage with balcony at one end made for really dramatic presentation possibilities which we utilized.

This week we read "Song for the pockets" by the California poet Gary Soto. This list poem creates an image of a person by enumerating the things in his or her pockets. The poet's careful word choices and personification of objects evoked many possible events. A "key whose door was burned", "harmonica grinning with rust" and "a rattle of seeds capsuled in foil" suggested to them a burned down house, music, and a garden to be planted sometime in the future.

This week Shields students took their inspiration from three short by two authors Carl Sandburg and Richard Brautigan. Students and I discussed how the poems worked so economically while at the same time expressing subtle things about our surroundings and thought processes. Sandburg's famous metaphor "the fog comes/ on little cat feet" in the poem "Fog" is echoed and teased at By Brautigan's "A Correction" in which he tells the older poet "Cats walk on little cat feet/ and fogs walk on little fogs feet, / Carl".

Here is a late-breaking post: I had some problems posting the images, but now that they are sorted out you can view the beautiful collage poems that our 6th-graders created after reading "Looking Around, Believing" by Gary Soto.

Click here to view collage images!

If you've been following this blog you know that the students at Walter Payton College Prep have been working this semester on mounting a production of the play Medea by Greek playwright, Euripides, using the influential translation by the American poet, Robinson Jeffers.

We are nearing our culminating event and it is my pleasure to announce that:

Medea in Pieces will have its premier at
The Timeline Theater on Tuesday, June 1st at 7pm.

TimeLine Theatre Company is located at
615 W. Wellington Ave. in Chicago.

    Our final poetry class at Skinner was more celebration than lesson, with the students from both classes performing their favorite poems in the gym. With the help of two student emcees, all three classes made their way to center stage to read favorite poems from the year. It's always exciting to see the progress the students make, from their first "Where I'm From" poems, to their careful revisions and rewriting. Thank you also to Ms. Ramakrishnan and Mrs. Rosenzweig for their gifts of student poetry anthologies!

      Our final poetry class at Pilgrim was more celebration than lesson, with the students from both classes performing their favorite poems in the chapel. Taken as a collection, their work stunned me, and reminded me of why I do this job, and how much I enjoy the poems Pilgrim wrote this past year. Standouts included a poem from the point-of-view of a painted figure on a canvas and an abandoned Barbie doll, and the way Terror (personified here in an excellent revision exercise)  can cling to us, even to our clothes! 

In our most recent class, the students and I read the poem On Turning Ten, by Billy Collins. I was excited to bring this poem to the writers, as it's one that honors the memories we already have of our lives while we are still young people. It is a poem that praises the history we already possess, and considers how a child's past informs and shapes who he or she is now.