Happy National Poetry Month!
(Feel free to search for poems in the sidebar or watch videos in the tab above.)
Hello, Poetry Friends! This month I am sharing poems written in the voice of Little Red Riding Hood, and I invite you to join me in writing in the voice of someone else too. You might choose a fairy tale character or a book character or a person from history or anyone else real or imagined. These are your poems, so you make the decisions. Each April day, I will share my poem and a little bit about writing poetry. Mostly, we’ll just be writing in short lines with good words and not worrying about rhyming. Meaning first. Our focus this month will be adopting the perspective of another…for 30 days. I invite you to join me in this project! To do so, simply:
1. Choose a character from fiction or history or somewhere else in the world of space and time, and commit to writing a daily poem in this person's voice for the 30 days of April 2025. You might even choose an animal.
2. Write a new poem for each day of April. Feel free to
print and find inspiration from this idea sheet that I will be writing from all month long.
Teachers, if you wish to share any HELLO MY NAME IS... subjects or poems, please email them to me at the contact button above. I would love to read what your students write and learn from how they approach their own projects.
LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD'S POEMS SO FAR
Students - Today's poem is a
triolet, an eight line poem with lines one, four, and seven repeating and lines two and eight repeating. Lines one, four, and seven also rhyme with line three and five, and lines two and eight also rhyme with line six. Each line of this poem has eight syllables...and as it happens,
so does the title, which also is part of the rhyme. (The title part is not usual for a triolet. I am just feeling especially playful today.) This poem form is one of my favorites, and if you wish to read more of my triolets, just search "triolet" in the search bar on the left.
If you would like to play with the triolet form, you need not rhyme and repeat in all of the ways. Perhaps decide to write an eight line poem that simply repeats lines two and six. Or choose two pairs of rhymes to thread through your poem. It can help to begin a poem with a wee bit of a plan, though I certainly do not always do this at all. And of course, often a plan must go by the wayside for a fresh new idea that just appears like a shooting star.
I look forward to spending today at the Burchfield Penny Art Center's Family Day where six local authors will read their books and children will be invited to participate in a variety of art activities.
Thank you for joining me on this fifth day of HELLO MY NAME IS...
To learn about more National Poetry Month projects and all kinds of April goodness, visit Jama's Alphabet Soup where Jama has generously gathered this coming month's Kidlitosphere poetry happenings. And if you are interested in learning about or writing from any of my previous 14 National Poetry Month projects, you can find them here. Happy National Poetry Month!
xo,
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