All posts in Washington

Week 2 at Washington: “You can have endless ideas!”

Our first unit at Washington introduces us to metaphor and simile, which may be the most important part of creative writing! To kick us off, Week 2 at Washington started with the first slam […]

Week 1 at Washington: “We’re all cool in a way”

George Washington Elementary down in Hegewisch is more than special to me. It was the first school that I was assigned to as a poet-in-residence with the Chicago Poetry Center, and in many ways, […]

Week 3: Getting Metaphorical!

Taking our learnings on comparative language a little further, we explored metaphor through personification and persona this week. First, we watched Sam Mercer become The Hulk and painstakingly try to perfect an omelet In […]

Week 2: Whatcha Thinking About?

During my senior year of high school, our brand new poetry slam team watched Mike Taylor’s Thinking About You from the Brave New Voices Poetry Festival. Until recently, I’d only seen poetry slam used […]

Week 1: How Cool Are You?

We kicked off the year with a look at Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool, complimented by a wonderful video by Crescendo Literary & Manual Cinema that updates & reimagines the classic piece, including a […]

“Color, make it pop” – Haikus, Part 2!

Time was truly tested this week. After several days of testing with shifted schedules, our class went at a much faster pace with more energy and less class time. Regardless, we had the same […]

“You should laugh a bit” – Haikus, Part 1!

This week, George Washington rounded out the first half of our residency with a dip into poetic form with a fun one: haikus! In the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring four different poetry forms: […]

“Just a kid from Chicago…” – Self-Made Bios!

To end our second unit focused on building narratives and storytelling, we took ourselves out of our own heads and created our own biographies! Instead of writing autobiographies, we used a 3rd-person perspective to […]

“The semi-colon is just a colon, but it had an identity crisis” – Run-on Sentences!

We’re learning how to tell a story, step by step. To eek out some of the details, we’ve been ending workshops with freewriting sessions that can be organized or written in any way; this […]

“We go way, way back” – Poems in Reverse!

The turn of the decade brought us all back to an earlier time than we’re used to with the typical New Year. Winter always tends to push our thinking inward for a season of […]

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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