All posts in Poems

‘To my brother/best friend’: Night Poems

Students thought about what occurs at night, the concept of home, and short forms before penning their own very modern poems inspired by Li Bai’s, ‘Quiet Night Thoughts.’ Quiet Night Thought At the foot […]

“I smelled the smell of Winter Air” Odes and Ekphrastics with Dulles

At Dulles, we discussed and learned about two types of poems that represent memory with imagery. We read Nikki Giovanni’s ‘knoxville, tennessee’, which inspired us to reflect on our Thanksgiving dinners and other happy […]

Happy Places

Later in the week, Ms. Wilson’s 4th-graders at Dulles Elementary dove right into figurative language! We read Nikki Giovanni’s Knoxville Tennessee and talked about our happy places. I lead them through a short guided […]

Sound Poems

This week at Dulles I brought in some poems and curriculum from the Hands-on-Stanzas archive (Thank you to Beth and Leslie!) and taught a lesson on sound poems. We started by reading examples from […]

‘When the Ocean Talks-after Frank O’Hara’: Lyric Poems by Middle Schoolers

A lesson on Personification, giving human qualities to something non-human via the poem: A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island. We looked at Frank O’ Hara’s touching and somewhat mystifying […]

Food Glorious Food

4th Grade Food glorious food! Today we wrote poems about all the things we love to eat and snack on. We talked about how food is great to talk about because it engages all […]

Do you hear what I hear?

4th Grade For today’s session, we talked about sound and all the different things we hear daily. We started off by trying to be as quiet as we could for a whole minute and […]

Outstanding Odes from 6th graders

For the third week in our mini-residency Dulles 6th graders explored odes. Odes are poems that praise and celebrate people, places, and things. On Tuesday we read “Ode to Kool-Aid” by Marcus Jackson. In […]

Five Minutes of Fame

Ms. Widman High School Creative Writing   This week the Viking writers read Morgan Parker’s “Beyonce on the Line for Gaga.” We chatted about persona poems and how voice and tone influence a poem’s […]

4th graders get musical with haikus!

For their 7th poetry lesson, Twain 4th graders discovered haiku poems. Haiku is a short Japanese poem that only has three lines. The first line has 5 syllables, 7 in the second, and 5 […]

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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