All posts in Poems

‘A family is…’: Abecedarians

Students wrote “Abecedarian” poems that use the entire alphabet as the lefthand spine of the poem. Lesson Note: Abecedarian poetry offers a structured framework to explore complex ideas. It allows the poet to navigate […]

What if we lived in a world without color?

Swift 2nd graders pondered this question, and then came up with responses such as “It would be boring,” “It would be sad,” and “Artists wouldn’t be able to have any fun!” In Ms. Pendola’s […]

Love Poems, Again

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, the young viking writers read Frank O’Hara’s “Animals” and Richard Brautigan’s “A Boat” and “Catfish Friend.” They were then tasked with writing a love poem to an unexpected object of […]

Do you love sour pickles?

Valentines Day landed on my most recent sessions with Swift 2nd graders, so we read Eloise Greenfield’s poem, “Honey, I Love.” Students enjoyed lines in which the poet said she LOVED “a flying pool” […]

Collage poems

Poetry and collage aren’t so far removed! Water’s 7th graders explored the intersection of the two by looking at examples from artists like Krista Franklin and Marcus Dawson. Then students created their own collage […]

most things are beautiful firecrackers

For our most recent session with Waters 6th graders, we delved into erasure poems, also known as blackout poems. After looking at a variety of examples, each student received an excerpt from Sandra Cisneros’ […]

Poems (with footnotes)

This week Water’s 6th and 7th graders in Ms. Smallwood and Ms. Hernandez’ classes read “Thank you Letter (with footnotes)” by John Grandits. In class we discussed creating double meanings in our writing and […]

‘Ask me about what my wonderful family does and i will tell:’ Abecedarians

Students wrote “Abecedarian” poems that use the entire alphabet as the lefthand spine of the poem. Lesson Note: “My essential poetics is simply to be doing something, making something, playing, struggling, learning something – […]

“I capture every moment…”

In Mrs. Siciliano’s 7th+8th grade class, we looked at “Sorrow Is Not My Name” by Ross Gay. Through the exploration of similes and metaphors, we learned about holding the complexity of things being both […]

Emotion Machines

If your sadness was a machine how would it work? This week we started off by exploring Ada Limon’s poem “The Quiet Machine”. In it Limon uses the structure of a prose poem to […]

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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