All posts in Mayda del Valle

I Am Poems

This week we got started with a second session of afterschool workshops at Clissold and our group has grown to include a few kindergarteners and 1st graders. I was really excited to introduce our […]

Persona Poems- 7th Grade

This week we explored persona poems, and used the opportunity to think about what it might be like to walk in someone else’s shoes. Students took their pieces a bit further past personification and […]

Questions

What’s more important, the answer or the question? This week we read excerpts from Pablo Neruda’s “The Book of Questions” and talked about all the questions we’ve always or never knew we wanted to […]

Ode Poems

This week Ms. Murray’s 4th graders explored the ode, a popular poetic form used to celebrate a person, place, thing, or even an idea. We started off by talking a bit about Pablo Neruda, […]

Editing- 7th Grade

This week instead of working on a writing exercise, I shared a few of my favorite writing resources with students. I walked students through how to use a free online visual thesaurus, Etymology sites, […]

We are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made of

Spring is in the air! For our session before the spring break students worked on poems about dreams. Dreams for the future, or the wild and strange things that we see on the movie […]

Animal Poems

This week at Clissold we started by asking the question if you could be any animal, what would you be and why? Our discussion was pretty lively, with a few students throwing in imaginary […]

Recipe Poems

This week at Clissold for our afterschool session, we wrote recipe poems! We discussed all of the different ingredients that might go into making up who we are in the world. It was a […]

Emotion Machines

This week our 7th graders read Ada Limon’s The Quiet Machine. This prose poem by the 2022 U.S. Poet Laureate, describes all of the different kinds of quiet she experiences, based on her state […]

On Mondays, I’m lazy!

What animal do you feel like on Mondays? How is a Friday different than a Tuesday and why? This week in Ms. Murray’s 4th grade class we read Francisco Alarcon’s On Monday I Feel […]

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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