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Altered Books 2

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, tagged altered books, preposition poetry on May 31, 2013| 4 Comments »

I’ve written about altered books before. I really enjoy losing my self in this project. I started working on one with my students and was determined to finish it. I left the art supplies out in the classroom, so I could paint a page, let it dry while I did paperwork, until eventually I had collected all the poems I wrote this school year. Most of them were posted on our class blogs as models. Now I have a keepsake for the year as well as my own personal book of model poems.

Found poem about bees

Found Poem about Bees can be read here.

I am From poem

Mother Nature (A Preposition Poem)

Poetry Friday is hosted this week at Betsy at Teaching Young Writers.

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What if?

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Teaching, tagged gifted education, poetry, student writing on May 24, 2013| 21 Comments »

Poetry Friday is hosted this week at Jama’s Alphabet Soup.

The end of the school year is always bittersweet. This year was especially so. One of my students finished sixth grade which means she is moving on to middle school. We have been together since she was in third grade. I love all my students, but sometimes one comes along who connects a little deeper. We become more than teacher and student. Kaylie is one of those students. Kaylie loves what I love. We shared books and favorite authors. We became writing partners. She read and commented on my writing as much as I did hers.

Kaylie’s mother wrote me a note saying that Kaylie was crying about leaving. She told Kaylie that I was like a mother bird that has prepared her birds to fly. It was time for her to fly. Kaylie stopped crying and said, “That was a great metaphor, Mom.”

I am so grateful for this special relationship. Kaylie wrote a poem for me. She put it in a book she made on Snapfish including pictures of us through the years. (Yes, I cried.) I wrote a response to her using her form. I put it into an accordion book, also with pictures. Call and response, so to speak. These poems are very personal, so I hesitated printing them here. But sometimes the deeply personal touches a universal theme.

What if
By Kaylie
What if you asked me-
just wondering-
If you wanted me to write
about our four years together?
What if you wanted me
to put that into a poem
Like the one you’re reading now?
Would I write about peanut butter,
nonsense talking sticking in my mouth
like the real stuff?
Or, that dreaded summer reading?
Would I tell you that I hated that?
Would I remember Daisy and Poncho,
the most beautiful spider story
I have ever heard?
Hmm…let me think…
I would definitely have to mention
all that writing: stories, poetry,
every letter, every word from my pen
inspired by you.
I would try not to talk about the tears
that shed when I left, though.
No.
I will only think of what you showed me,
and how I will use it in my life.
If you told me to write a poem about all of that,
just to remind you of me now and then,
I think this poem
would do just that.

By Kaylie

What if?
What if you wanted me to write a poem
about our four years together?
Four years, really? Hard to believe.
No wonder you are so much a part of my life.

I know you. You know me.
Greater than a teacher and student,
yet not a mother and daughter.
(Even though I caught myself sometimes calling you my daughter.)
My poem would have to say how
teaching you was easy, fun, delightful.
I watched you blossom from a tiny, shy seed
to a dancing flower singing,

“Anything you can do, I can do better.”

And yes, you can. You can be
whatever you want to be.
Be who you are.

You are a writing teacher’s dream,
but more than that…
You trusted me with your heart,
your mind, your creativity.

If you wanted me to write a poem about our time together,
I would write through tears,
wipe them away
and say
You are ready
to fly,
sweet bird.
Your wings will
soar!
–Margaret Simon, all rights reserved

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Who is your Persona?

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, tagged gifted education, Out of my Mind, persona poem, The One and Only Ivan, writing about book characters on May 10, 2013| 9 Comments »

As we continue to make our way through the alphabet, this week we worked on persona poems in my classroom. I started the lesson by sharing Margaret Atwood’s poem, Siren Song. We discussed the poem and why it is a persona poem. Also called a mask poem, the writer takes on the persona of a famous person, historical figure, or character and writes from that person’s perspective. I gave them some line starters, such as, “My song is…” “My prayer is…” “I am from …” They were allowed to use the computer to find more information. I asked them to include known facts and little known facts.

The students who impress me most are those who take my assignment and run away with it. The poem grows into something much bigger and much more meaningful than I could’ve imagined. Two of my students decided to write about a book character. What I love about each of these examples is the poem stands alone, even if you do not know the book it is from. Two popular books in my class this year have been “The One and Only Ivan” by Katherine Applegate and “Out of my Mind” by Sharon M. Draper. I hope these poems make you want to pick up and read these books if you haven’t already.

For more persona poems, visit our kidblog site.

The One and Only Ivan
by Brooklyn

I am an artist,
hairier than most artists you know.
The food I crave is a banana,
because
I am a gorilla.

I know what you
guys are thinking.
A gorilla is
not capable of
making art,
but I am.
I know what you’re
saying ,
most of the time.

I am from
the forest,
but I live
in
The Big Top Mall.
It is caged, but
I somewhat
enjoy it here.
I have friends
animal and human.
Yes, this is
true,
and believe me
when I say,
they like me too.

I am not how you think
gorillas are.
I am not mean,
or scary.
I am not trying
to escape and run after you.
I want you to be my friend,
but you can’t hear me
when I say,
“Hello,
my name is Ivan,
what is your name?”
all you hear is a
roar,
and a hum,
and a grumble.

My song is
the thumping on my chest,
which you
hear wrong.
It doesn’t mean I’m mad,
I’m only trying to say “Hi”,
but most of you run.

You would never know how
nice I am,
if you always run away.

All I ever wanted,
was to talk and communicate,
without my paintings,
which look like
a black blob,
with a yellow patch,
and a gray bubble,
me.

So here is my prayer,
don’t judge me by my looks,
look at me with
your soul,
not your eye,
and hear my words,
and be my friend.

As Melody from Out Of My Mind
by Kaylie

Elvira, Elvira
I wish I could tell you
That it hurts when you tease me
I wish,
for once,
that you would understand
what I go through.

Elvira, Elvira,
Born in Ohio soil
Raised with a disability
I want to be noticed,
But in a good way.

Elvira, Elvira,
You gasp when you see me,
Pushed in my wheelchair
By my mother.
But I’m still human, Claire.

Elvira, Elvira,
I tap out the words,
LOOK. AT. ME.
See me, for who I am.
A smart girl.

Elvira, Elvira,
You don’t know the taste
Of music like I do.
Pleasant, flowing, green, resounding.
The song passes through my fingers.

Elvira, Elvira,
I want to be like you.
They don’t know
How hard it is
To have cerebral palsy.

Elvira, Elvira,
I wish I was appreciated.
Here I am,
Being Melody,
Being myself.
Don’t you hear?

Poetry Friday is hosted this week by Anastasia at Booktalking.

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Mother’s Day Poetry

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Teaching, tagged color poems, I Love you the Purplest, metaphor, Mother's Day writing on May 3, 2013| 14 Comments »

We are still writing poems in my classroom even though April is over and May is here. This week we worked on poems for our mothers. If you are a mother of one of my students, stop reading now and save it for after Mother’s Day. You don’t want to spoil the surprise.

I love the beautiful picture book, I Love You the Purplest by Barbara M. Joosse. The watercolor images by Mary Whyte are amazing. The story is sweet about a mother going fishing with her two boys. The boys want to know which one she loves best, and the mother cleverly answers, “Julian, I love you the bluest. I love you the color of a dragon fly at the tip of its wing.” The other boy, Max, she loves the reddest, the color of the sky before it blazes into night.

After reading the book to my students, we talked about colors and what they can symbolize. Each student selected a color and made a list of possible things to use in a poem. There are some great resources for this lesson on Writing Fix. You can find a list of color metaphors as well as a printable form.

Specifically for the Mother’s Day poem, I asked the students to write about their mothers. They wrote some great poems. They typed and printed and painted a background for their poems on a canvas board. I think many mothers will be brought to tears by these gifts of love.

Momma,
I love you the pinkest
The color of a baby girl’s blanket
A freshly bloomed rose
The color of a small little piggy
And brand new point shoes
The color of breast cancer awareness
An October birthstone
The perfect pink for you ………
The color of your three little girly ballerinas
–Rhyan, 6th grade

I love you, Mom, the Greenest.
An emerald when a miner pulls it freshly out of the wall,
Leprechauns running around their pot of gold,
The grass when freshly mowed,
Lettuce from the sky,
The four-leaf clover on the ground,
The pickle on your burger,
The leaves you feel when you feel a tree.
I love you, Mom, the greenest.
–Tobie, 2nd grade

Mom, I love you the orangest.
I love you like the blazing sunset,
like the fire in my eyes,
like a melted orange ice pop,
dripping down my fingers.
I love you as orange as the way
your red hair used to look.
Mom, I love you the orangest.
Matthew, 3rd grade

For more Mother’s Day poems, go to our kidblog site. My students love comments.

Poetry Friday is hosted this week by Elizabeth Steinglass.

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26 Acts of Kindness

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, tagged 26 Acts of Kindness, Boston marathon, gifted education, kyrielle on April 26, 2013| 14 Comments »

One of the greatest things about teaching gifted kids is that I am amazed everyday. This week we started a new service project inspired by the original 26 Acts of Kindness in response to the Sandy Hook massacre. The 26 Acts was revived following the Boston marathon bombing recognizing the 26 miles of the marathon. We made a poster to hang in the hallway near the cafeteria and students are making announcements daily to encourage others to do an act of kindness and add a note to the poster.

When one of my students, a 6th grader, came in to the classroom on Wednesday morning, she asked, “What letter are we doing today, Mrs. Simon?” I hadn’t made a plan because I was not officially having class. (I had to test some recommended students.) So I said, “K is for Kyrielle. Google it.” She did, and she began to work with the form.
“What topic should I use?”
“What about 26 acts of kindness?”
That was the extent of my instruction. I tested the students while she worked quietly. When I finished and the students left, she said she was stuck. I still left her alone. My two fifth graders came in. Again, I was not “officially” having class, so the three of them worked together on the kyrielle. They decided to use an aaaa rhyme scheme. They opened rhyme zone on the internet. It was fun to just sit back and watch this happen. The kyrielle has an octo-syllabic pattern, so they were counting out beats and adding and taking away words to make each line 8 syllables.
My three students were so pleased with their results, as was I, that they decided to read it aloud on the morning announcements. The whole office staff was touched and amazed. I think I should get out of their way more often.

26 Acts of Kindness

There’s something kind that we must do
To pay respects, so let’s be true
It won’t be for me or for you
So help the dreams they can’t pursue

Please, show your kindness, here’s your cue
Be the person God asked you to
We can stop them from feeling blue
So help the dreams they can’t pursue

Their families are torn in two
Come, everyone, and get a clue
Those men would wish they could undo
So help the dreams they can’t pursue

What is our country going through
To me, it feels like déjà vu
You all know who I’m talking to
So help the dreams they can’t pursue

by Kaylie, Brooklyn, and Kendall

If you want to leave these students a comment, their poem is posted here on our kidblog site. For more about the ABCs of poetry, go to my guest post on Caroline by Line.

Poetry Friday is hosted this week by Laura Purdie Salas at Writing the World for Kids

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Gratiku

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, tagged gratiku, haiku, Happiness, nature poetry, Shawn Achor, tanka, Ted Talks on April 20, 2013| 1 Comment »

Poetry Friday is hosted this week by Irene Latham at Live your Poem.

My sister-in-law sent me a Ted Talk video of Shawn Achor, “The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance.” I watched the whole thing. He is a good speaker, engaging and funny, so I recommend you watch it, too. I was wondering, though, if he would ever get to an answer. Sometimes people can easily identify a problem, but lack any real advice for a resolution. However, Shawn Achor had an answer. And an easy one at that. Make these 5 small changes to create more happiness in your life.

1) 3 Gratitudes
2) Journaling
3) Exercise
4) Meditation
5) Random Acts of Kindness

So today, I exercised (walked my dog) and thought about 3 gratitudes. Since it is National Poetry Month and I am trying to write a poem every day, I turned my gratitudes into gratiku, haiku about gratitude. I want to thank Diane Mayr at Random Noodling for introducing the superstickies site to me. The third gratiku became a tanka and wouldn’t fit on a stickie, so I used the app Overgram.

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Writing Bad Poetry

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, tagged ghazal, J.K. McDowell, National Poetry Month, poetry forms on April 12, 2013| 14 Comments »

Join Poetry Friday with Diane at Random Noodling

G is for ghazal. I am no expert in poetry. I have a degree in elementary education and a masters for teaching gifted. I have only studied poetry on my own through workshops, reading, and internet research. My list of publications in poetry is short. But I do enjoy trying out new forms. One of the ways I try out writing new poems is by consulting with an expert.

My chosen expert for ghazal is J.K. McDowell. Jim published a book of poems that were all written in the ghazal form. I met Jim at a poetry reading last year and again at a wordlab a few months ago. We are now Facebook friends.

To write this ghazal, I read Jim’s book, Night, Mystery, & Light, published by Hiraeth Press. I used his style of 3 lines that together form a unit that could stand alone as a poem. I collected some of his lines and words. When I later researched on the internet, the definition confused me.

From Poets.org “The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets—and typically no more than fifteen—that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet’s signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet’s own name or a derivation of its meaning. – See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5781#sthash.zcpOLhm5.dpuf”

Jim McDowell’s book

I asked Jim about the couplet and rhyming that I didn’t see in his style. This was his response: “The tradition form is two lines of 18. This can be rough in English, so Bly does three lines of 12. Six stanzas is also a Bly innovation, but common. Hafiz has some pretty long ones, he is the Master of the ghazal but not the Ladinsky translations, they are more free form. My limited understanding is to not rhyme but repeat a special word. Also the last stanza can refer to or address the poet. In a higher form the poem even begins and ends with the same word. I still think the most important is that each stanza be a stand alone poem, the leaping and multiple threads and flow the most powerful.”

Now both of these definitions sound rather scholarly and may be too much for you, and for that matter, for your students. But I gave it a good ole college try. I kept to the Bly tradition of 3 lines, six stanzas. Each stanza could stand alone, and each ends with the same word. I also refer to myself in the final stanza. Let me know what you think. I have to say I had fun with this exercise.

…writing bad poetry

A glass of white wine, maybe red, or some pale ale
smears my day’s end like a phantasm of words
echoed in sounds of prayerful poetry.

Charlie barks at a passing squirrel, pulls hard.
Loosen the leash, make release for his chase.
Mary Oliver, meanwhile, would write poetry.

I want to believe more deeply in pure joy,
sip coffee and look into your eyes for truth.
This delicate awareness becomes my poetry.

Mark time with a toast to events of the each day,
Symphony Day, Iris Blooming Day, Waltzing Day.
Give notice to the day that finds poetry.

I know this hunger that no food or drink subsides.
Will the sunset reveal a sepulcher of secrets?
Do these rambling scribblings mimic poetry?

Historians liken Margaret to a queen who waves
from high upon the royal steed. Did any
Margaret you know turn blue writing bad poetry?

–Margaret Simon, all rights reserved

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Poetry Forms are Hard!

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Teaching, tagged ABCs of poetry, double dactyl, poetry forms, teaching writing on April 5, 2013| 7 Comments »

I know this is an ugly picture. This is my journal page after struggling all day long with the double dactyl form. Ugh! I almost gave up. It was like a puzzle or a really hard math problem. Although, had it been a really hard math problem, I would have given up hours ago. I shared this process with my students. They could see me struggling. I would call them to attention and test it out, then shake my head, “No, not yet.”

The double dactyl form has so many requirements. I used to think rhyming was hard, but rhythm is harder. A dactyl is a long, short, short syllable pattern. Then there’s this rule that the second stanza has to have a double dactyl word. And who has ever heard of a spondee?

Most of the examples I read had a person’s name for the second line. I decided to use a book character and who better than the tragic character of Miggery Sow from The Tale of Despereaux? I found out by reading my poem aloud to my last group of students that you can’t quite “get it” if you haven’t read the book. I have to credit my fifth grade boys with the last line. High fives all around when they came up with that one.

My students are writing poetry like mad over at our kidblog. Please check them out and leave a comment or two. They love comments.

Now for my attempt to capture Miggery Sow in double dactyl.

Higgledy Piggledy
Miggery Sow was a
young girl who longed to be
princess like Pea.

Handful of cigarettes
perfidiously swapped;
Birthday wave brings forth a
queen wannabe.

Join Poetry Friday with Robyn Hood Black.

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National Poetry Month

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Slice of Life, tagged kidlitosphere, National Poetry Month, teaching writing on March 29, 2013| 15 Comments »

Slice of Life Challenge Day 29

Passion is energy. It’s the power that comes from focusing on what really excites you. When we live with enthusiasm, we fully engage our brains and bodies in our activities, building new pathways that foster health and wellbeing. –Oprah and Deepak, 21 Day Meditation Challenge

I am looking forward to the month of April. Don’t you just love the sound of the word, “April?” I love poetry. Actually some people (namely my husband) think I am obsessed. I can’t help sharing this enthusiasm, passion, obsession with my students. And what better time to celebrate poetry than the month of April! National Poetry Month

Last year I decided to teach a poetry form for every letter of the alphabet. It was a challenge to find one to fit each letter. However, with state testing taking one week, and spring break another, we ran out of days before letters. I want to do this again. I have discovered so many new forms from the triolet to the rondelet, and even a clogyrnach. We will try ghazals and pantoums, sonnets, and ekphrasis. See an alphabetized list on Poets.org.

I plan to continue our Slice of Life blog page for posting poems each day. If you or your class would like to follow us, click here.

I will write alongside my students as I always do and share the results with you here on my blog. I have joined the kidlitosphere progressive poem. See the schedule in my sidebar.

Shh, don’t tell, but we plan to post poems all around the school, secret poems, so we can have everyone reading poems throughout their day.

I am still toying with ideas for a final product. Last year we transformed old books into our own poetry books using a technique called altered books.

Do you have any plans? ideas?

If you teach 7th-10th grade, your students can participate in the Dear Poet Project.

National Poetry Month

Poems will echo in the halls,
be pasted on walls,
carried in pockets,
and shared out loud.

Listen to the words
of Naomi Shihab Nye.
Rhyme silly with Shel Silverstein.
Rap with Nikki Giovanni
and imagine like Jane Yolen.

It’s a national phenomenon,
this month of poem fun.
Come on in!
The writing’s fine!

Join Mary Lee at A Year of Reading for more Poetry Friday

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Immersed: A Book Spine Poem

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Slice of Life, tagged Book Spine Poetry on March 24, 2013| 8 Comments »

Slice of Life Challenge Day 24

On Friday, Poetry Friday, Elsie shared this call: Travis Jonkers, from 100 Scope Notes (http://100scopenotes.com/) puts a call out each year for your (yes, you) spine poetry. He said, “If you do give it a go, take a picture and post it to your blog, or send it my way via email (scopenotes (at) gmail (dot) com). On Tuesday, April 2nd I’ll be posting a gallery with all your work, and continue to add to it for the entire month.” Click here to go to a page of hints and examples of spine poetry.

On Friday, I gathered some books in my classroom to create this book spine poem. This is fun for kids, too, but makes a mess of your library…creative chaos.