Poetry Friday round-up with Tricia at Miss Rumphius Effect.
Every once in a while a volume of poetry comes along that blows me away. The National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry is an anthology that will keep my poetry self satisfied for a while. Edited by J. Patrick Lewis, the poems are illustrated by amazing images. This glossy book even smells good.
Laura Purdie Salas posted last week about her poem Brinicle which is included in the Book of Nature Poetry. This was a totally new subject for me, so I took the chance that it was new to my students. They were transfixed by the video she posted. Then we read and discussed her poem. Laura gave us lots to talk about. (free verse, imagery, personification, metaphor, and sounds)
The assignment: Turn your Wonder into Poetry Using Animoto. Since I am traveling to NCTE this week, I wasn’t sure how or if my students would write their poems and make a video. I’ve checked in on their kidblog site, and they have been posting some cool poem videos. I’ll share a few here.
Poetry Friday round-up with Bridget at Wee Words for Wee ones.
Photo by Laura P. Salas
If you haven’t discovered Laura Purdie Salas’s Writing the World for Kids and 15 Words or Less, you’re missing some poetry fun. I love playing with words. Every Thursday, Laura gives us a chance to “wake up our poetry brains” by writing a quick poem in response to an image.
If you are having trouble fitting poetry playtime into your schedule, this may be your answer. Earlier in the year the site was blocked by our school server, but yesterday I tried again and by some miracle (or maybe a little nudging email), the site was open for viewing. I set the timer for 7 minutes and we wrote. Sacred writing time. I am always amazed at what my kids can do in such short blasts of writing.
Not everyone followed the rules. Tobie tweaked them a bit and quickly produced a rhyming poem that has 15 words in each stanza. I told him I couldn’t post it in the comments on Laura’s site, but I would share it here.
X marks the spot of chests of gold
They who find it prove themselves bold
X marks the spot of ye treasure
As he who finds gets thee pleasure
The spot to find depends on thee
the shadow of branches of a tree
He who finds it grants one wish
Most men want an excellent dish
As one wise man steps up to thee plate
He wishes for ye wishes eight
So if ye find the sacred treasure
Be wise with your choice, others or pleasure
–Tobie
Can trees really walk
Or dance while we’re not watching?
Disco, cha cha, frozen in place.
Emily
Giver of life
Lush green leaves
Shade for the creatures
Thank you trees
For life.
Erin
Shadows copying
Shadows dark
Shadows curly
Shadows straight
A big family of shadows
Kaiden
On these writing days, Laura and other writers chime in with comments on each other’s poems. Here’s what Laura had to say about my three writer’s offerings. “I love these, Emily, Erin, and Kaiden–thanks for sharing! I like the three different moods/techniques. Emily’s is full of whimsy, Erin’s of reverence, and Kaiden’s of pattern. And all full of imagination:>)” Real feedback from a real author! So cool!
Poetry Prompt
This week, listen to a poem new to you–by a contemporary poet or a bygone poet–and jot down the words, phrases, and images that are most striking or memorable to you. Then write your own poem inspired by this list of words. How do you transform someone else’s poetic intuition and choices into a work that demonstrates your personal idiosyncrasies and specific aesthetic sense?
The word Listen caught my attention in this prompt. How does listening change your perspective? Reading and collecting words is easy. Would listening work as well?
One of my favorite poets is Naomi Shihab Nye. I’ve had the privilege of seeing her live and meeting her in a workshop setting. But this is a new school year, and I hadn’t brought her voice into the room yet. I selected a video from the Dodge Poetry Festival, one I had actually attended, so I could tell the kids, “I was there!” If you haven’t heard this poem, it is hilarious and much more so from the actual voice of Naomi Shihab Nye. She wrote things her 2-3 year-old-son actually said.
I instructed my students to collect words while they listened. Some lists were long. Others had nothing. So I asked the ones who wrote to share their words. “If you don’t have any words, you can steal these.”
I love this kind of writing prompt because you never know where the words will take you. A few of the students wrote their own random poems, a list of nonsensical sentences. This was OK with me because the intent of the experience was to hear poetry and play with language. We don’t play enough with words. Poetry is playing. You can read all of the poems on this padlet.
I want to share a few here also. My poem is written for that student who constantly sings aloud in the classroom. You know the ones who have a beat to their step.
Music leaps into her ears
down to her toes.
Tap, tap!
Her feet gallop across the floor.
Bit-a-bit-bit!
Notes fill the cup,
spill over her lips
like dictionaries for songs.
I would miss her singing.
I would miss her jumping feet.
I would miss loving her.
–Margaret Simon
Erin is only in 4th grade. When I read her poem, which she wrote covering two white boards, I told her she had the wisdom of a 65 year old. I also told her that she created a question/ answer form in her poem.
What is love?
Love is when you want a person to be your Valentine
so bad you want to gallop away with them.
What is love like?
Love is like a swing.
It can bring you up
or take you down.
Is love hard?
Love is like a peanut,
hard on the outside
but sweet on the inside.
What can love do to you?
Love can make you talk gibberish.
Love can make you dance the night away to soulful music.
What can love feel like?
Love can feel hard like a pecan cookie
or be soft like an ooey, gooey chocolate chip cookie.
What can love make you feel like?
Love can make you feel
like you are close by your
Valentine when you are truly
one thousand miles apart.
Love can be the best
or worst thing in the world.
–Erin, 4th grade
Emily is also one who is wise beyond her years. She picked up on Naomi’s opening when she said that we are all born poets, just some of us keep it up.
Life
It is hard being a person
But, living is a gift that is given,
and all metal was liquid first,
and all people have to find their way to be.
Everyone is born with poetry,
but not all people stick with it.
You know when you find your thing
when you have music in your legs
and jazz in your toes.
Poetry Friday round-up with Mary Lee at A Year of Reading
Do you know about the famous Fibonacci Sequence? The ages old sequence that creates a spiral, a shape found in nature? The mathematical sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8…Do you see the pattern? More information (including algebraic equations) can be found at Math is Fun.
I had forgotten about using the sequence in poetry until a colleague introduced it to our 6th grade enrichment group. We are working on Unsung Hero projects. Our previous meeting had been a field trip to see and hear about heroes in our own town. She asked the students to recall the field trip by writing a Fib poem. I wrote about the Buddhist Temple in our local Laotian community.
Wat Thammarattanaram, New Iberia, LA
Stands
tall
above
Buddhist monks
humbly giving self,
Temple of golden ornaments,
Temple of sacrifice,
meditate on lasting love.
–Margaret Simon
A Fib poem follows the syllable count as in the mathematical sequence, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. And if you are feeling wordy, you can tack on a line of 13 and 21.
A few years ago I had used this form with my students when we were sharing The 14 Fibs of Gregory K by Greg Pincus.
I tried out the form on my other students. I asked them to write about our field trip to New Orleans, the Aquarium and Insectarium, last week. The exercise was quite a challenge. I, too, struggled. But that’s what writing is all about, right? We made a padlet.
Each afternoon, I read aloud another chapter of Fish in a Tree. We usually write notices and wonders to add to the Voxer chat with other classes, but yesterday, I asked Jacob to write a Fib poem with me about Ally, the main character. We started over 3 times. Jacob was being very patient. Each time he’d write the syllable count down the margin of his journal page. Finally we liked what was coming, but we couldn’t quite get that last line. Then Jacob just blurted it out. Some days my young students blow my mind. We recorded it on the Voxer chat.
Why?
Why?
Ally
thinks she’s dumb,
so afraid to tell,
hates being locked up in her brain.
–Jacob
Using strict forms can be frustrating, but when it works, when we discover a winning line, we can say “Boom, Gotcha” to that Fib!
Poetry Friday round-up with my dear friend, Amy, at The Poem Farm.
Mrs. Simon, I don’t know what to write. Oh, no! I don’t have anything to write about! I have writer’s block today, Mrs. Simon.
These words echo in my classroom regularly. Why? Because we are all writers. And we all know that writing is hard.
I asked my students to write long about a book we are reading. (Global Read Aloud: Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly HUnt.) You could hear the sighs. For some reason, that bad word…long…sent them into total fear. So I saddled up to the computer connected to the board. After stumbling over the necessary technology to get them to see what I was writing, I set about modeling a long writing.
I actually surprised myself that I could do this on-demand-in-front-of-everybody writing from nothing. But I realized that it all comes from practice. I just started typing and the words came. My students laughed at my typos as I was trying to type quickly. They noticed that my long writing was only 140 words. The assignment became less intimidating.
Yet, one of my best writers sat in front of her computer not typing. And it seemed the longer she stared at the blank page, the harder it got for her to start. I didn’t have a very good answer for her. It happens. We’re writers. We are going to have those days when nothing comes to mind. So I let her leave class with this instruction, “Think about what you may want to write about and we’ll start again tomorrow.” Some writers need time to think.
I know this is Poetry Friday, and you are asking yourself, “Where’s the poem?” Sometimes with writing, you need to write about what you need to write about.
Kielan is a writer. She is in 6th grade, and I’ve taught her since she was in second grade. She’s had her share of writer’s block, but she is connecting with Ally in Fish in a Tree. This is her long writing about how she was bullied like Ally.
In Lynda Mullaly Hunt’s book Fish In A Tree, Ally’s at the restaurant where her mother works. Her mother is a waitress there. While Ally is at the restaurant suddenly her “friends” walk in. Shay and Jessica walk in the restaurant and start talking to Ally.
Ally tries to resist them, but her mother thinks she should talk with them. Her mother doesn’t know what Shay and Jessica do to Ally. They talk to her about the sympathy card Ally gave to their teacher. Something similar like this happened to me too.
I was in 4th grade when it happened. A girl named Emily was in my class. Every time a teacher was near she was nice to me, but when there was no teacher near she was mean to me. When she was nice to me I would reject her and then I would get in trouble.
She sat right in front of me in class and we were kind of enemies. I had to read aloud in class and answer the question. I read the passage right, but I got the answer wrong. Then she got called on and she got the question right. She looked at me, gave me a mean look, and then rolled her eyes. After school she saw me in Mcdonald’s at Walmart. She called me smart, her friend, pretty, and nice, only because my mother was around, but then the next day at school, she called me dumb, mean, her enemy, and ugly. She made me think I was dumb. Just like Ally felt in the story.
I made my own quote. “Trust no one” and “Never trust a phony with anything”.–Kielan
The weather actually cooled off last week, so with the crispness of the air and the ending of September, we ventured out to the sidewalk to chalk fall poems.
I love to post poems that my students write. Today I celebrate a new writer in my class. Kaiden, 5th grade, joined us at the end of the year last year. (Gifted classes are revolving all year.) I love how he used the repetitive rhythm of the word fall as well as imagery about the season.
Fall
by Kaiden
Crisp brown leaves crunching under our feet
Fall
The cool breeze blowing against our faces,
Fall
The appearance of scary monsters and pumpkins,
Fall
A possible stroll through pumpkin patch,
Birds migrate south,
Fall
Vannisa, 6th grade, is back this year and adding in a little research into her fall poem. She actually looked up which meteor showers occur in the fall. I love how she wanted to connect meteor showers with fireworks.
As we Fall
by Vannisa
As we fall into winter,
the weather chills
and the leaves come down.
They fill the ground with
a fiery red
and blazing orange.
As we fall into winter,
we can no longer watch fireworks
like 4th of July,
but we can watch
the shooting stars of
Orionids and Leonids
and watch the days get shorter
until Spring comes back again.
Poetry Friday round-up with Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe.
The beginning of the school year is becoming the middle of the school year. Days are passing quickly. October is already here. The promises of classroom connections are coming to life.
In order to welcome classroom connections, we created a Where I’m From poem modeled after the popular poem form by George Ella Lyon. Last week my students each wrote their own poems. This week we created a collaborative poem. I put it all together in an Animoto video.
If you are blogging with your elementary class using Kidblogs, you can connect to us here. Next week we will start blogging about Fish in a Tree, this year’s Global Read Aloud. We can’t wait! And Lynda Mullaly Hunt has promised a video a week. Read all about this event here.
Poetry Friday round-up with Michelle at Today’s Little Ditty.
Ruth Ayres invites us the celebrate each week. Click over to her site Discover. Play. Build. to read more celebrations.
This is a dual posting for Poetry Friday and Celebration Saturday because this week we celebrated Dot Day. What a great week we had!
On Tuesday, Sept. 15th, my students have come to expect Dot Day. It’s a tradition in my gifted classroom. And every year gets better. A friend of mine made me a Dot Day skirt, a felt poodle skirt full of dots.
I received a text from a former student with the greeting, “Happy International Dot Day!” Thanks to Peter Reynolds for writing The Dot and for establishing Dot Day, a day to celebrate creativity, resilience, and empathy. Did you know there’s a Dot Day song?
We shared our enthusiasm on Wednesday with Mrs. Rogers’ first grade class. Two students shared the reading of the book and everyone danced to the song. Then the first graders decorated coffee filters with markers. I brought a spray bottle, so each gifted student sprayed their group’s dots. We had so much fun. Their teacher, Mrs. Rogers, invited us back on Friday. Her kids had made thank you drawings and wanted to perform the song for us. They had been practicing. The smile never left my face.
My kids want to do another activity with them. One suggested Chalk-a-bration. More to come!
Back in our classroom, I started a document with this line, “A blank canvas stares at me.” I invited the students to add a line to our class Dot poem. Then I put it all together in this Animoto video. I think it will make you smile!
Poetry Friday round-up with Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge
You be the book, I’ll be the binding
You be the words, I’ll be the rhyming
~That’s What’s Up, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
Last week on Poetry Friday, Tabatha posted a music video and a paired writing prompt. I thought her idea might work well with my students. We have a class blog on Kidblog.org. Each week I post what I’m calling a “Snippet of the Sea” for students to respond to. Two weeks ago the quote was from Nelson Mandella. They watched a video from the History Channel and answered hard questions about privilege and education and the word weapon. While this was a worthwhile exercise, this week I borrowed Tabatha’s idea and lightened things up a bit.
Here’s the video from Lennon and Maisy and my students’ responses. While they did not have to think very deeply, they did have to rhyme and think about how things go together. But mostly, it was just plain poetic fun.
You be the front, I’ll be the back
You be the ball, and I’ll be the bat. (Lani)
You be the pencil I’ll be the lead.
You be the blanket I’ll be the bed.
You be the butter I’ll be the bread
You be the blue I’ll be the red. (Tobie)
You be the biscuit, I’ll be the jam
You be bread, I’ll be the ham
You be the green eggs and ham, I’ll be Sam I Am.
You be the beans, I’ll be the spam
You be Mary, I’ll be the little lamb (Kielan)
You be the socks, I’ll be the shoes
You be the trumpet, I’ll be the blues (Emily)
You be the sky, I’ll be the horn fly.
You be the sun, I’ll be the fun.(Andrew)
You be the sun, I’ll be the shine.
You be the tree, I’ll be the pine. (Kaiden)
You be the dog, I’ll be the cat.
I’ll be the hair you be the hat. (Jacob)
You be the needle, I’ll be the thread.
You be the say, I’ll be the said. (Vannisa)
Margaret Simon lives on the Bayou Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana. She is a retired elementary gifted teacher who writes poetry and children's books. Welcome to a space of peace, poetry, and personal reflection. Walk in kindness.
Reflections on the Teche 