All posts in Poems

Fourth Grade’s Favorite Furry Friends!

For our second session at Smyser, we started the day with a warm-up game where we introduced ourselves with an alliterative adjective to go along with our names. I was “Energetic Em!” The students […]

Exploring Our Writing Impulses at Waters

Greetings, supporters and poetry lovers! This past Wednesday I was thrilled to kick off a yearlong residency with the 6th grade classes at Waters Elementary. After learning more about students’ likes and loves, their […]

Poetry and Playfulness (6th grade)

Today in Ms. Shah’s 6th grade, we talked about play and surprise. We talked about how poetry can give us tools to express some of our deepest emotions and thoughts, while also giving us […]

Poetry and Playfulness (8th grade)

Our first poetry unit in Ms. Krasic’s 8th grade class is on play and surprise. We talked about how poetry can give us tools to express some of our deepest emotions and thoughts, while […]

Kindergarten Wishes

In Kindergarten today, we talked about wishes and imagining the things we would love to see happen. The kids drew amazing pictures of their wishes and each student wrote a line of our combined […]

Smyser’s 4th Graders Face Their Fears!

For our first session at Smyser, we closed out the spooky season with a poem that shows bravery in the face of fear: Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Scare Me at All. We looked at […]

4th Graders Introduce Themselves

When I introduced myself to 4th graders in Mr. Adenuga’s class – telling them that I would be joining them for poetry each week – students responded with some skepticism. Some hoped that we […]

‘…I get praised…’: Poems For Around The Table

A typical household object became the focus of this lesson while studying Joy Harjo’s poem, Perhaps The World Ends Here. The poet James Merrill once commented that ‘we understand history from the family around […]

Sabin Elementary School | 5th Grade

We are reading these poems about personification and questions & answers: Has My Heart Gone to Sleep? Antonio Machado Has my heart gone to sleep? Have the beehives of my dreams stopped working, the […]

Sabin Elementary School | 4th Grade

We are reading about personification: Has My Heart Gone to Sleep? Antonio Machado Has my heart gone to sleep? Have the beehives of my dreams stopped working, the waterwheel of the mind run dry, […]

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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