All posts in Poems

“Chicago Is Gotham City”

Happy Spring Break, reader! Last week, Sayre’s students dove a little deeper into figurative language with metaphors. We spent some time reading Philip B. Williams’ “Declaration” and discussing the parts of the city we […]

6th Grade Concrete Poetry

For our third poetry lesson, we focused on concrete (visual) poetry. This form of poetry is where the words on the page form the shape of the thing that the poem is about. After […]

Concrete Poetry

For our third poetry lesson, we focused on concrete (visual) poetry. This form of poetry is where the words on the page form the shape of the thing that the poem is about. After […]

Recipe Poems

This week at Clissold for our afterschool session, we wrote recipe poems! We discussed all of the different ingredients that might go into making up who we are in the world. It was a […]

Poems as Eyeglasses

Hello again! Last week, Grissom’s poets got real about what poetry means to them. After watching a video of Jamila Wood’s “Blk Girl Art,” we discussed feelings we associate with reading poetry. Students were […]

Emotion Machines

This week our 7th graders read Ada Limon’s The Quiet Machine. This prose poem by the 2022 U.S. Poet Laureate, describes all of the different kinds of quiet she experiences, based on her state […]

On Mondays, I’m lazy!

What animal do you feel like on Mondays? How is a Friday different than a Tuesday and why? This week in Ms. Murray’s 4th grade class we read Francisco Alarcon’s On Monday I Feel […]

‘Attitude knows her worth and/ she don’t play’: Emotion Poems

Students talked about and then wrote poems about emotions using personification. Lesson Note: “Developing creativity in students is not a luxury.” How Social-Emotional Imagination Facilitates Deep Learning and Creativity in the Classroom  Gotlieb, Jahner, […]

Sound Effects

The weather outside school walls happened to be warm and springlike, contrasting with the scene set in Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Arguably, the opposite environment intensified its […]

‘I’m kayaking up to Sleeping Bear Dunes’: Travel Poems

We took a look at Richard Blanco’s prose/mix/hybrid poem about missed destinations, We Are Not Going to Malta. Students were then given travel brochures exhibiting lush locales (decidedly not always depicting reality), and asked 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