All posts in Poems

Butterfly Doors (Haiku!)

To start my final week with the 4th graders at Dulles, I thought we would try our hand at some Haiku. We read translations of Issa Kobayashi and discussed how Haiku are based on […]

Word Searching

Happy Winter Solstice! Carver’s students spent last week carving out some time for poetic exploration with books from my personal collection. After spending some time catching, up, students spent time drawing words from different […]

Older Generation Poems

For our second-to-last session, Twain 3rd graders thought about their older generation of grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We read “My Grandmother” by Pela Chacon and “Abuelito Who” by Sandra Cisneros – both poems in […]

‘…Casper the Ghost playing with me’: Poems on Age and Reflection

Students shared childhood stories before writing their own poems reflecting back on their younger selves, as the speaker did in Billy Collin’s poem, On Turning Ten. Lesson Note. “I think one of the strengths […]

‘and dad/ and mom/and people/ and pool/’: Food and Memory Poems

Nikki Giovanni is a well-known African-American poet who spent summers with her grandparents in Knoxville, Tennessee, when she was a little girl, doing many of the same things kids like to do during the […]

‘The Whee-who/ The waves/ The quiet/ The stir/ Wow.’: Poems on Age and Reflection

Students read and discussed Billy Collin’s poem, ‘On Turning Ten,’ before writing their own poems on the subject of age and nostalgia. Lesson Note: “When you put something out there onto a piece of […]

Revisions & Readings

During our fifth and final week together, 6th graders at Dulles spent time revising their poems, then celebrated with a reading joined by the students of 302 and 303. To revise, students looked over […]

“La Vetura” Our Final Class!

In our final week at Dulles, we continued to refine and edit our poems to prepare for the Dulles Poetry Reading, with two other poetry classes led by Caroline Stevens and Joy Young from […]

“The sounds of friends laughing” Imagery and Memory with South Loop Poetry Club!

This week at South Loop Poetry Club, our poets studied imagery and asked ourselves, how can we put someone else in our shoes? Using Nikki Giovanni’s Knoxville, Tennessee, we drew inspiration from the different […]

Poetic Forms and Cootie Catchers (8th)

Today, was our last day before break and the last lesson in our unit on surprise and play. We talked about how varied poetic forms can be and how there are no rules in […]

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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