It's Poetry Pocket Friday

Monday and Tuesday are my last workshops at Norwood Elementary School in Dundalk.

It’s been a great residency. Because it’s my second year at the school, the teachers and I are comfortable working together. I walked in to the school earlier this month with a good sense of what to expect from the students.

Lately, I’ve been saving a fun lesson for the last day of elementary school residencies. The focus of this session is writing with imagination. The model poem is “Eliza’s Jacket,” by Calef Brown. It’s from one of the Shovan family’s favorite books, “Polka Bats and Octopus Slacks.” (Listen to an amazing review of this book by Daniel Pinkwater on NPR.)

Eliza’s Jacket Eliza has a jacket, a jacket made of pockets. The pockets all have numbers, numbers on the jacket pockets. Pocket three has bees inside, sixteen contains their honey. Number eight has cracker crumbs and wads of Turkish money. Twenty-three is filled with gum (all unchewed I hope), while right next door in twenty-four is kept a one-inch piece of rope. Thirteen is packed with useless facts, and four has melted snow. What’s in the rest you’ll have to guess. It’s not for us to know. By Calef Brown Used with the author’s permission.

After reading the poem, we talk about all the cool lines.

Some kids like the idea of having bees in one pocket and honey in another. We talk about the melted snow (why doesn't he just say "water"?) The line "all unchewed, I hope" plants the yucky image of chewed up gum in our minds, even if that's not what Eliza has in her pocket.

Our writing exercise is to guess what's in Eliza's other pockets -- or what would be in them if the jacket belonged to us. The prompt: If you could have anything in your pocket, what would it be?

Kids come up with amazing ideas for these poems. Super powers, magical maps, a favorite teacher who will spend the summer with you – going to movies, reading together and hanging out.

If you’re interested in doing the poetry pocket craft pictured here, please visit my poetry website for kids. You’ll find detailed instructions and a sample response poem from a third grader at Northfield Elementary in Ellicott City, MD.

My kids love Brown’s wacky humor (which also shows in his artwork) and his off-beat rhymes.

The 8-year-old has several of Brown’s poems by heart, like “Olf” the terrible pirate. Olf isn’t awe-striking terrible, more like really pathetic terrible. He has a carrot instead of a parrot – you get the idea.

My favorite Brown poem is “Kansas City Octopus.” Who can resist a disco-loving octopus in tight, red bell-bottoms? Not me.

Brown has a new blog intended for children. Check it out at http://polkabats.blogspot.com/

Enjoy some poetry with your Thanksgiving leftovers. Poetry Friday is brought to you by Under the Covers this week.

Have a wonderful holiday weekend. I’ll be spending it with family and friends…at a wrestling tournament.

Amok in Third Grade, Day 5

When it’s Revision Day with elementary schoolers, I loan every student a pair of re-vision sunglasses. We’re going to look at our poems again, pretending we've never seen them before. I’m learning, too. During last year's residency at Norwood, I tried to cram everything in on Revision Day. “Did you use any onomatopoeia? What about a simile? If you’re changing ideas, remember to leave a space to show a new stanza.” The kids were overwhelmed. I realized that elementary schoolers can tackle one thing during this lesson. Most important to me and their teachers: making their poems look like poems. Sounds simple, right? Not when your teacher has been telling you “fill the paper” with writing for three months. Not when you’ve written (horrid shudder) dozens of BCRs before your 9th birthday, faithfully filling up those little lined boxes with topic sentence, supporting details, and explaining how the text relates to yourself. Their first drafts tend to look like a blob of words. If the paper runs out on the word “a” – that’s the end of the poetic line. Choosing *not* to write to the very edge of the paper is a big hurdle for third graders. Here’s how we take the leap: 1. I borrow a very blobby first draft from a student and put it on the document display. (If the school only has overheads, I arrange with the student and teacher in advance to make an overhead copy.) 2. The whole class goes through the poem phrase by phrase. I mark a back-slash every time we see a new idea or feel we should start a new line. I explain that the / mark is a poet’s symbol for “new idea, skip down!, start a new line” and that this draft is like a map for our rewrite. Some students get this right away and are excited to contribute. They see where the lines breaks should go. However, the class poet has the last word. 3. If we see simple errors like spelling, punctuation and dropped words, we fix them. 4. I get fresh paper (best to have the same kind the students use) and rewrite the first several lines. Now the poem is beginning to look like a poem! 5. The teacher and I walk around the room. Some kids will recopy their poems, writing to the end of the line, dutifully copying the slash marks onto the new draft. We explain and start again. 6. Throughout the workshop, I am putting work on display. If Josh is getting the hang of line breaks, I’ll show the whole class his rough draft with the “skip down” symbols, then his new draft. It looks like a poem. What an exhilarating moment that is for young kids (and their teachers). Sometimes, the children even see how a poetic line emphasizes words and ideas, making them more powerful. Whew! That was hard, important work. The students are beginning to absorb the idea that poetry is a different type of writing, with special rules that set it apart. By now, I'm glad that we've planned a fun lesson for the last workshop. More on that tomorrow.

Writing Exercise: Animal Similes

Recommended for: Everyone

Perfect for: Elementary Schoolers 

Many poets-in-the-schools do a version of this lesson, in which we compare animals to emotions. The poems I get are powerful, sometimes frightening because the emotions are so raw. That’s a good thing. Children can be reluctant or even unable to write about what they're feeling. When we ask them to focus their writing on animals, it allows children to step away from their emotions and look at them objectively. 

Prompt: “When I feel ______, I am like a _____.” 

I ask that all poems begin with this line. The rest of the poem can list a variety of things: how does the animal behave in ways that fit your feeling; is there anything about the animal’s looks or body that matches well with your feeling; when you feel this way, how are you and the animal similar? We brainstorm by listing emotions on the board.

Over the years, my students have stepped beyond the typical happy/sad feelings. They’ve written poems about feeling brave, triumphant, lonely, lazy, anxious. I choose one for the topic of our group poem.

For some children, it’s helpful to match a color to the emotion before we pick an animal. In one of my Norwood classes (Ms. Kerner or Ms. Lurz – sorry I didn’t keep track!), we chose “Mad” for the feeling and brainstormed red, gray and black for the colors. Then we thought of an animal for each color. We ended up with a mad red crab, a mad gray elephant, and a mad black wolf. Here is the class poem:

When I am Mad


When I am mad, I am like a gray elephant. 
I stomp on the ground.
I want to smoosh the person who made me mad.
I want to hit the person with my trunk and throw them.
I’d yell with my trunk.


I read a few more samples from past students, and the poets are ready to write. For a recent book of animal poems, check out Laura Salas’ “A Fuzzy-Fast Blur: Poems about Pets.” She blogged about it recently at: http://laurasalas.livejournal.com/107169.html 

 This workshop is useful for adult fiction writers, too. Susan Gray of GottaWrite Girl came to my summer SCBWI workshop on using animal totems to build character. She wrote about it for her 10/8/08 post. Children’s author Sarah Maury Swan was at the same workshop. She wrote a nice article about it. Adding an animal to a story she was working on helped Sarah add depth to the protagonist’s experiences. You can read Sarah’s article in our regional SCBWI newsletter, click on Fall 2008.

 Happy writing, everyone! Being a full-time writer and arts educator is one of the things I'm most thankful for.

Amok in Third Grade, Day 4

Animal Similes

When I announce that we are writing animal poems, the crowd goes wild.

This poem came to me through the New York City Transit’s Poetry in Motion program. What could be better than reading this during your subway ride:

Hedgehog

He ambles along like a walking pin cushion,

Stops and curls up like a chestnut burr.

He's not worried because he's so little.

Nobody is going to slap him around.

Chu Chen Po (9th century)

Translated from Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth

The lesson:

We warm up with a Zen drawing exercise. Sounds fancy, but it’s simple and serves several purposes.

Each student has a piece of paper and a crayon or marker. The task is to draw an object (their own hands) in one continuous line – no picking up the marker once they start. To turn off that “inner critic,” we draw without looking at the paper. That’s hard! Everyone wants to peek.

The drawing isn’t the important thing here. We end up with squiggles, bumps, scribbles. But when I write on the board, “It looks like…” everyone gets excited. Suddenly, our scribbles look like camels, turtles, baseball mitts, coral, cacti, ghosts.

The purposes of this warm up: turning off the inner critic, using art intelligence (if you’re into MI), and using simile.

We compare seeing shapes in our drawings to seeing shapes in the clouds. 

The kids start to understand that making similes is something they already do. Comparing things, even when they aren’t really the same (my hand is nothing like moose antlers), helps us make sense of the world.

On to the poem. Before we read, we share what the students know about hedgehogs.

Then we read and draw out the similes. I bring my pin cushion for those kids who don’t have one at home. It’s easy to see why “a walking pin cushion” is a good simile for a hedgehog. I’ve also got a little jar of sweet gum burrs, which we use in place of the chestnuts in the poem. These, I pass around for tactile learners. These items are prickly, round and small. The burrs are brown like a hedgehog.

We also talk about the third line. The poet (1200 years ago!) compared a hedgehog to a type of person. I ask, “Do any of you know someone like this? A kid who might be small, but no one picks on her because she knows how to stand up for herself.” Many hands go up.

The last line – there’s so much to talk about in this little poem – we focus on the word “slap.” I ask students to hold up a hitting hand. Most of them make fists. We imagine how it would feel to hit a hedgehog. Ouch.

But the poet used the specific word “slap” on purpose. We open our hands like a slap and I watch the faces change. Students wince and say “ooowww.” The poet wanted us to imagine what those spikes touching our sensitive palms would feel like. It would hurt!

Next post: Animal Simile Writing Exercise