All posts in Poems

Things That Go Bump In The Night

This week our 4th graders at Perez explored all things Monsters. We started off our session by doing exquisite corpse drawings of monsters. Each table passed around their sheet of paper to everyone in […]

‘I did/a good job, and I stayed in the game/all day.’: Poems in the form of Letters

Students wrote epistolary poems in the form of letters, fashioned after basketball player Kobe Bryant’s poem, “Dear Basketball.” Lesson Note: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what […]

Diversity in Identity

For our 15th sessions, Swift 2nd graders reviewed what they remembered from last week when we watched a video of Janet S. Wong who talked about the value of handmade, handwritten, and well-thought-out gifts […]

Twain 5th graders begin to take hold of their dreams…

For our 3rd time meeting for poetry, Twain 5th graders shared some of their daydreams and sleeping dreams before we read 3 different poems about dreams: one by Annie C., a 3rd grader, one […]

‘with twigs and mud and worms for eating’: Video-Inspired Poems

Students watched a bear cam video similar to the one described in the poem we studied, ‘There was this bear cam’ by critic and poet Sandra Simonds. Sandra Simonds charts the formations and deformations […]

Dear Sky,

For their 8th week of poetry Hamline 6th graders explored various ways to communicate with one another. Nowadays people usually use social media, emails, texts and phone calls to stay in touch with one […]

“He is like a bolt of lightning”

This week, we read (in our best Hulk voice!) an excerpt of “Hulk Smash!” by Greg Santos and “Forest Walk” by Kristine O’Connell George. We talked about how to write a persona poem in […]

Allusions: “Whenever I see a heart, crown, and a trident…”

This week we talked about allusion! We read a poem by Nikki Giovanni, brainstormed our own allusions, and then students used their own brainstorms to write a poem about allusion in whatever way they […]

“Your voice, your choice. It’s you” Poetry Books with South Loop Poetry Club!

For our last week of South Loop Poetry Club, our talented poets continued to work on and finish our individual poetry books. Some students revised and reminisced on old poems we wrote in class, […]

Kindergarten Final Party

We received our published books in Kindergarten today and held a final “Coffeeshop Party.” We ate sprinkle-y cookies (because poetry is full of color and detail and surprise!) and did a reading, including snapping […]

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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