All posts in Ola Faleti

Concrete Poetry

Hello hello! For my 5th week with Jordan’s 6th graders, we delved into the world of concrete poems, also known as shape poems. After students saw some engaging and graphically designed concrete poems, we […]

Ending with an Ars Poetica

As we prepare to wrap up the schoolyear at Waters, it felt fitting to end on the Ars Poetica. Ars Poeticas are poems about the craft of poetry – how it feels to write […]

The Places We Come From

For our last session at Jordan, 6th graders explored the people, places and things that represent where we come from. We opened up with an activity where students created their own paint chips based […]

Living on the Verge

One could argue that we’re always living in the midst of change. It’s true now and it was definitely true a quarter century (!!) ago, when we were on the verge of a new […]

Poems in Shapes

Greetings, greetings! For our most recent session with Waters 6th graders, we talked about the fun, surrealist concrete poems! We looked at a bunch of different examples before reading Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Social Distancing”. […]

Strong as a Raging Fire

For our third week at Jordan, 6th graders delved into the wonderful world of similes! First, we talked about what a simile is and students heard their classmates give examples (for instance, this soup […]

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 […]

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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