Using a lesson from Climb Inside a Poem: Reading and Writing Poetry Across the Year (Heard and Laminack), we encouraged students to look for poetry in the most simple and ordinary places, to use a "poet's eye." Poetry is all around us and we need to only look and listen carefully to find it. It always amazes what these eight-year olds come up with. Even children who normally struggle with writing, seem so uninhibited. They love the fact that poems can be about anything and that they don't need to follow the the conventional rules of grammar. They love that they can skip lines, use all capitals, even write words upside down! Here are the places they found poetry hiding:
Poetry hides in...
- my comfortable bed that is soft and fluffy like snow.
- reading that shows you a picture in your heart. Reading is your imagination. Reading what you think about the most, it's what you do every day.
- water that is as blue as diamonds flowing in the sky.
- a flower that is pretty and pink and the leaf that’s green and the spine that you can feel.
- a snowman because it shines like the moon in the sky.
- skiing downhill in the snow and ice. Blinding white snow flies behind me and my brother.
- grapes with the seeds drinking the juice with very much glory.
- a spider web with rain like my mom’s pearl earrings.
- pizza’s cheese. It can be like a monkey’s vine.
- a tree, a tree full of branches like hands sticking out in the sun.
- a can of nuts because a can of nuts rattles like a maraca.
- a spider’s web covered with dew running down the silk strands of lace.
- swimming pools, in water-filled waterslides zooming down. All’s a blur, splash! Sploosh! Out I come.
- cake, cake tastes as soft as snow.
photo credit: String of Pearls by flickr member James Jordan