All posts in Waters

Making Poems out of Poems

It’s hard to believe we’re near the halfway point of our Waters residency, but we are! For the ninth week, we talked about erasure poems, also known as blackout poems. I found out that […]

‘people calm as an empty hospital’: Simile Poems

Students talked about similes before reading Mike Taylor’s poem filled with the same! Here is some of the writing that resulted from that exercise! Lesson Note: “Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even […]

A Picture is Worth ______ Words

As the old saying goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words….and writers of ekphrastic poetry would probably agree! Ekphrastic poems are poems written in response to an image, often a work of art. So for […]

‘Throw Abraham Lincoln’s hat in…’: Potion and Recipe Poems

Students read ‘Truth Serum’ by Naomi Shihab Nye before penning their own potion and recipe poems. Students discussed TRUTH, LIES and how both can sometimes hurt and often STINK to high heaven! Lesson Note: […]

‘You have to put water in it:’ Name Poems

‘I celebrate and sing myself…’-Walt Whitman. Students explored names through a series of prompts, which began with reading the poem, ‘a girl named jack’ by Jaqueline Woodson. What occurs in the naming of someone […]

Home Is What We Eat

Hello, poetry lovers 🙂 I believe it’s important to bring what’s happening in the greater world into the classroom. In a lesson largely inspired by Stuti Sharma, this week we talked about what students […]

The People, Places & Things We Come From

Greetings! Last week was our sixth session with Waters 6th graders. We explored the nouns and experiences that make us who we are by writing classic “I Am From” poems. This format is inspired […]

‘it feels like a hug from the past”: Odes

Students read Ode To My Shoes by Francisco X. Alacron before penning their own wonderful odes! Lesson Note: “If it were up to me, everything I love would have a poem in praise of […]

Large & Small Joys

Hello, poetry lovers! After a bit of a holiday break/poetry hiatus, Waters 6th graders were ready to jump back in. For this session, we read Ross Gay’s “Sorrow Is Not My Name” and explored […]

‘The Whee-who/ The waves/ The quiet/ The stir/ Wow.’: Poems on Age and Reflection

Students read and discussed Billy Collin’s poem, ‘On Turning Ten,’ before writing their own poems on the subject of age and nostalgia. Lesson Note: “When you put something out there onto a piece 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