All posts in Washington

Cutting Up

To wind up our lessons, we created cut up poems! We used found language and images to create new meaning. Lesson Note: Creative Artist guru, Julia Cameron, says the part of us that creates […]

‘I remember/ all of it’: Nostalgia & Memory in Poetry

8th Grade students shared childhood stories before writing their own poems about the act of ‘putting away’ and ‘looking forward’ as the speaker did in Nate Marshall’s poem, ‘the last graduation.’ Lesson Note: “I […]

‘I’m going here but I/ don’t plan on staying. : Constructed Futures in Poetry

cussin on the court till your little brother shows up with a half a candy bar kid -Eve L. Ewing, to the notebook kid This lesson centered around Eve L. Ewing’s consoling poem, […]

O so now your weaving mi?: Creative Syntax in Poetry

Students were given nonsense words and asked to create their own pronunciations and definitions, before delving into Kevin Young’s poem of altered cliché’s, Errata ‘Errata’ means an error in a written text. Lesson Note: […]

‘When I see Superman/I see power I see’: Hero Poetry

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

‘I took a trip to Harvard in July.’ Iambic Pentameter Parts 1 & 2

In two class periods 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 […]

‘As the| years went| by everything became fine.’: Emily Dickenson…in 8th Grade

This week we met/re-met Emily Dickenson, who had us looking at her poem, I’m nobody! Who are you? Discussion and experimentaiton followed on identity, iambic trimeter and tetrameter, dashes, rhyme and patterns in language […]

Travel. Agent.

We took a look at Richard Blanco’s prose/mix poem about missed destinations in, We Are Not Going to Malta. Students were then given travel brochures exhibiting lush locales (decidedly not always depicting reality), and […]

‘They both wash away and/ become remade’: At Table

A common household object became the focus for this lesson, while studying Joy Harjo’s poem, Perhaps The World Ends Here. Lesson Note: Harjo once commented, “I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to […]

‘You’re Latina, right?’ : The Question Poem

We opened class by playing a few rounds of Rapid Fire Questions ( a set of random questions that a student tried to answer in under a minute) before we began to wrap our […]

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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