All posts in Washington

“In this world, everything is perfect” – Imagining Utopias!

To end our first quarter of classes, we watched & read Danez Smith create a heaven in “summer, somewhere” and created utopias of our own. Just as Smith painted a picture of their ideal […]

“I Roll. I Roll, roll, and roll…” – Persona Poems!

For our third session, Washington Elementary and I dove into other worlds with personification. We’ve been focused heavy on metaphor and descriptive language; to round out this section of the residency, I wanted to […]

“A Sunflower Surrounded by Roses” – Exploring Metaphor!

In our second week, Washington Elementary and I took some time to make connections. The changing of autumn into winter is something that poets have pined over for centuries, and surely our minds are […]

“To me, it feels like home” – Introductory Freewrites!

For Washington Elementary’s first session of 2019-2020, we wrote freewrites based on our favorite things, places and experiences that shape who we are as people. We read Gwendolyn Brooks’ classic We Real Cool and […]

‘Last year I was a 12 -year- old kid.’: Reflection Poems

For our last two poems, students shared childhood stories before writing their own poem reflecting back their younger selves, as the speaker did in Billy Collin’s poem, On Turning Ten .8th Grade students reflected […]

In Sight: Visual Poetry

Students used their imaginations and magazines to create visual poetry! They revisited some of their original works to give them new meaning by giving them a new shape! Lesson Note: Creative Artist guru, Julia […]

In The Black: Blackout Poetry

Blackout Poetry: A blackout poem is when a poet takes a marker (usually black marker) to already established text–like in a newspaper–and starts redacting words until a poem is formed. The key thing with […]

Hero’s Welcome: Hero Poems of All Kinds

What makes a hero (both real or imagined), and how can we learn from them (even the villains) and the inner- hero inside of us? We explored those concepts and more in the poem, […]

Shakespeare!

In this lesson, we focused on the Shakespearean Sonnet and iambic pentameter. In his Sonnet 127, William Shakespeare muses on beauty and its perception as a ‘currency’ in the modern world: ‘In the old […]

‘Do you ever just want to go/to a valley full of flowers?’: Meditaiton Poems

Students participated in a 10- minute creative writing meditation and breathing exercise. After the meditation, they were asked to write whatever came to mind. Classwork was conducted in silence. Daydreaming and even boredom were […]

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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