Last week at Tarkington the fifth graders read Gerard Manley Hopkins's "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day," an Italian sonnet that uses great alliteration, rhyme and sprung rhythm, Hopkins's own metric invention.

Thanks for coming back! This week, the 6th grade writers read The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee, by Navarre Scott Momaday, which is a breathless and jubilant meditation on the connectedness of things. We looked at this poem as an example of someone using metaphor to communicate the essence or feeling of something. A step beyond simile or comparison, metaphor lets a writer relate an essential quality of something by saying that it IS something else.

For what I thought would be a refreshing change of pace, I brought in several pieces of music, from Debussy's "Clair de Lune" to "Atlas" by Battles among others, and played 2-3 minute clips of each. Some were instrumental, others were in languages other than English. I invited students to listen to the songs and let the music create an image in their minds, and then to write short pieces based on those images.

Welcome back! My apologies to 6th grade poets in room 308! Their poems were left under a folder in their classroom the week they were written, and so are being posted one week behind those from room 305. But here they are, in all their glory! Here, again, is a description of that week's lesson: The students wrote "Quality" poems this week, following a discussion about the use of simile, or comparison, in poetry.

      Dreams and poetry have more in common than we think. This week at Skinner  everyone read Wallace Stevens's wild poem "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, " which begins: "The houses are haunted / By white night-gowns." In this dreamscape we encounter a wealth of concrete images, a world packed with color, animals and articles of clothing--there's nothing in the poem that a reader can't see.