All posts in Waters

Seeing the World in Color

For our last session with Waters’ 6th graders, color was on our minds! We listened to a lyric video for the Rolling Stones song “Pain It Black” and talked abut how black shows up […]

‘Because everyone has a right to…’ Because-style Poems

Students read Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s poem ‘Learning to Love America’ before they wrote their own ‘Because’ poems. Lesson Note: Born in Malacca, Malaysia, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim was raised by her Chinese father and attended […]

Self Portraits with Words

How do we paint a picture of ourselves with words? that’s the question that guided our last session at Waters elementary. First, students drew cartoon versions of themselves. Then, we read “Self Portrait” by […]

‘And the tape wears off and the streamers…’: Party Poems.

Students imagined life as a party and wrote poems using that metaphor based on Jason Shinder’s poem, ‘The Party.’ Lesson Note: “Find some humility, or it will find you.”― Jason Shinder, poet Mrs. McClain, […]

Instructions for Living

For our last session, Waters 6th graders discussed how to give good instructions. First, we did an activity where one student instructed another stuent on how to draw an animal. How is that different […]

‘Por eso es mi felicidad mirar…’: Concrete Poems

Students created concrete poems to showcase shape and style. Below are the first drafts, which were hand-drawn and written! Lesson Note: “I think you should be intuitive and playful in your choices and determined […]

‘Quinceañera’: Poems of Play

Students made the old-school paper game called a ‘Cootie Catcher,’, which is a form of origami used in children’s games. Parts of the catcher are labeled with words that serve as options for a […]

In Someone Else’s Shoes: Persona Poems

Persona Poems are an exploratory of another person’s psyche, and allow us to imagine being someone else for a while. For this session, Waters students read one of my poems (!) titled “Lavender,” heavily […]

‘I’m kayaking up to Sleeping Bear Dunes’: Travel Poems

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

Writing You a Letter…

Hello hello! Last week, Waters students explored the ever-relevant epistolary poem. Epistolary poems are poems in letter form. We read “Another Night at Sea Level” by Meg Day, a poem rich with imagery […]

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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