All posts in Skinner West

Right Place, Right Time

After a week off for spring break, we sprang back into action by reading Jane Kenyon’s “Afternoon in the House.” We began our discussion by thinking about who the speaker could be, keeping in […]

Shhhhh!

We began last week’s pre-spring break classes talking about secrets—under what circumstances it’s OK to keep them, if they change as we age, historically and culturally ‘famous’ examples, etc. That discussion readied us for […]

Good Night

Hard to believe we’re almost halfway through this year’s residency! With the recent switch to daylight savings time having occurred, I began classes this week asking students if they considered themselves to be a […]

Magnificent Magnification

For our third poetry class, students were introduced to another figure of speech to add to the others (simile, imagery, personification) we’ve studied so far: metaphor, which, like simile, compares two unalike things in […]

Counting on You

For our second week, we read and discussed Peter Schmitt’s “Friends with Numbers.” Continuing from the last session’s introduction of line and stanza to the conversation, I added personification, simile, and imagery as elements […]

All Tied up in Nots

Last week, we finally kicked off the fully remote 4th grade residencies at Skinner West! While my face-to-face classes were the only ones to wrap up last year prior to quarantining, and by now […]

Poetry Is…

Today we had our final classes of the residency. After returning last week’s work, I said that we would be doing something different for our finale, based, as some other writing prompts have been, […]

Sock It to Me!

This week’s poem was our longest yet—“Ode to My Socks” by Pablo Neruda. Despite being 85 (!) lines long, it read quite briskly, because of its short lineation and enjambment, and we spent a […]

Read Letter Day

Letter writing is one of humankind’s earliest means of communication, and the epistle is a poetic form that plays with that concept. Emily Dickinson‘s “Dear March—Come in—” demonstrates how flexible epistles are, while also […]

Attitude: Gratitude

This week we read Robert Hayden‘s “Those Winter Sundays” and discussed the sonnet form. In the poem, the non-gendered speaker remembers their father who worked hard seven days per week, providing warmth for a […]

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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