All posts in Ola Faleti

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 […]

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 […]

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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