All posts in Ola Faleti

Finding Our People

During our second week of poetry at Jordan, we did some thinking about what it means to belong. To start, I had students work at their tables and come up with a list of […]

Seeing the World in Color

For our last session with Waters’ 6th graders, color was on our minds! We listened to a lyric video for the Rolling Stones song “Pain It Black” and talked abut how black shows up […]

Warming Up with Metaphors

Last Friday, we kicked off a short and sweet residency with 6th graders at Jordan Elementary! I talked about what students can expect over the course of our time together, experiences students have with […]

Self Portraits with Words

How do we paint a picture of ourselves with words? that’s the question that guided our last session at Waters elementary. First, students drew cartoon versions of themselves. Then, we read “Self Portrait” by […]

Instructions for Living

For our last session, Waters 6th graders discussed how to give good instructions. First, we did an activity where one student instructed another stuent on how to draw an animal. How is that different […]

In Someone Else’s Shoes: Persona Poems

Persona Poems are an exploratory of another person’s psyche, and allow us to imagine being someone else for a while. For this session, Waters students read one of my poems (!) titled “Lavender,” heavily […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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