A Wish for Today

In a Tree

Photo by Amy LV

Students - The picture you see above is our son!  On Monday, he decided to read in a box elder tree in our yard.  But he did not choose to just sit on a branch.  Rather, he chose to tie his hammock into the tree's branches.  The book he is holding is THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES.

I have been thinking about trees lately as my father has done a lot of work on our own family tree, and I often wish I could go back in time to meet my long-gone ancestors.  Today's poem marries our son's reading tree with this longing to know the people of my past.

If you're wondering what to write today, you might consider thinking about what's been popping up in your mind lately or you might begin by recalling an image from this past week.  I often take photographs of scenes that interest me to write about later.

Another idea is this. You might choose to simply lift my title, "A Wish for Today" and use this to inspire your own wish poem.  What is one wish you have for today? Earlier this week, I visited Harris Hill Elementary School in Penfield, NY, and some of the kindergarten students were writing wish poems.  Perhaps they helped to give me this idea too!

You may have noticed that this poem rhymes the following words: tea, tree, see, me. This did not just happen.  After I wrote the first two lines, I knew that I wanted to keep rhyming with tree, so I made a list of words that rhyme with tree and then chose from there.  The words led the way to this poem!

COMMENTER ALERT...Over at my other blog, Sharing Our Notebooks, I am so excited to host the sixth grade notebookers of Michelle Haseltine's class for the first ever notebooks blog takeover!  Every single day of May, a new student or pair or group of students will share tips and ideas for notebooking.  Please stop by for inspiration and writing ideas!  And leave a comment; comments mean so much to writers of all ages!  Plus, someone will win a cool new notebook each Saturday!

Jama is hosting today's Poetry Friday roundup at Jama's Alphabet Soup with bluebirds and blue...  Each week we gather together, sharing poems, books, and poetry ideas all at one blog.  All are always welcome to visit, comment, and post!

Please share a comment below if you wish.

If you are under 13 years old, please comment only with a parent 

or as part of a group with your teacher and class.

Collecting Stars and History Poems

Welcome to Day 19 of Drawing Into Poems, my daily drawing/seeing/writing study into poetry.  You can read more about this month-long project here on my April 1 post.  Feel free to read the books with me and pull out your own sketchbook and jewelry box full of metaphor too...

As a part of this project, you may remember that along with the daily drawings, I will be posting at-least-weekly poems inspired somehow by that week's drawings.  Here is my third one.

Students - Today's poem grew (oddly enough) from my watering can drawing.  I did lots of writing off of that drawing (just doodling around with words, waiting to see what would come) when I wrote the phrase, "I'd like to fill a watering can with stars."  I followed that trail for a while until it finally grew into this little verse.  My favorite part about it is that really short last line.  I want to experiment with switching up the meter at the end of a poem a bit more.

And here is the drawing of the day, my first building of the month.

Day 19 - A Building

Click to enlarge the drawing.

Students - As soon as I saw this window, I knew I needed to draw it.  Why?  Because it had a lot of angles, and angles are pretty scary to me.  When something is scary, the best thing to do is just tackle it straight on.  It's difficult for me to make something look three dimensional, and so exercises like this are just what I need. Maybe I will keep looking for more interesting windows to draw; maybe I'll even frighten myself into getting good at drawing them!

I could not be happier to welcome fourth grade teacher Theresa Annello (who also shared Poetry Calendars with us in December of 2010) and her young poets, visiting us from the Paul Road School in the Gates Chili Central School District in Western New York. Theresa shares her class's exploration into writing history poems with us today.

Poetry is a good fit for many young readers and writers.  We continue to be blessed with growing additions to the world of children’s poetry. I am especially excited by the work with nonfiction poetry.  My fourth graders peruse the work of Jane Yolen and Joyce Sidman. These ladies are pairing poems and short informational articles like the party planners at our New York wineries. Here at the Poem Farm, students look forward to our visits clamoring for the poems and the accompanying student notes. We love the way Amy makes us feel as though she is speaking to us!

Last year, Amy shared some information and background for writing History Poems.  The mentor list was especially helpful as I began to plan for our Iroquois poetry writing.  I perused the wonderful anthology by Lee Bennett Hopkins HAND IN HAND. We studied “Harriet Tubman” by Eloise Greenfield, “John Hancock” by Lee Bennett Hopkins, & “Paul Revere Speaks” by Myra Cohn Livingston. A while back we had also read “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus.

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Amy’s question, “Does this poem speak to us FROM the past or does it speak to us ABOUT the past?” guided our thinking and discussion.  Students noticed that Paul Revere was speaking to us ABOUT his life. On the other hand, in Hopkins piece Hancock is quoted but not the narrator of this poem ABOUT the past. It seemed that writing FROM the past could be tricky, but several students were up for the challenge.

Since it was several months into the school year, students were generally comfortable with poetry both as readers and writers. In the fall, we put on masks and pretended to be something or someone else. We wrote mask poems from varied points of view: pencils, ice cream, video games, pumpkins, and more.

For this task, students could choose the type of poem as long as their writing was a sampling of what he or she learned about the Iroquois. We brainstormed and listed possible subtopics. Next came modeling/shared writing of a poem ABOUT the Iroquois Confederacy. The first few stanzas looked like this:

Years of disagreement,
Years of war,
A time of great sorrow and terror
For five Iroquois nations.

Along came a wise man
with a message of hope.
Good news of peace and power.
“Stop the madness,”
“No more death and destruction.”

Deganawida was his name
But most knew him as
The Peacemaker.

It was time for writers to have a go on their own.  At first many students tried to write from memory, soon realizing they needed to refer to their notes, handouts, and books. I thought writing a “Found Poem” might be a possible scaffold to try in the future.  However, for our first attempt with History Poems, I was especially impressed with their topic selection and voice. In the past, many students have written the dreaded acrostic poem, simply grabbing random facts to match a given letter. The result of which was often a rambling mismatched bouquet of wild flowers.  The mentor texts, the shared experience, and the exposure to different formats supported writers and led to successful History Poems.

Here is a sampling of poems penned by 4th grade writers (click to enlarge):

Thank you so much to Theresa and to her students for inspiring us with their history poems today. This is such a wonderful way to wrap up a unit of history - write a poem!   Find more about Theresa's writing and teaching at her warm and inspiring blog, Looking for the Write Words.

If you would like to see more such POETRY PEEKS into classrooms, please just click here or the POETRY PEEK button above.  Teachers - I welcome each of you to contact me about sharing a poem project or some student work here.

If you are interested in winning a copy of my new book, FOREST HAS A SONG, look in the left hand sidebar of this blog, and you will see four blogs that are currently offering a giveaway for the book.  And if you would like to hear the radio spot I did about the book last weekend with Linda O'Connor for her Parent Talk program on The Breeze here in Buffalo, NY, you can listen to it here.

Click the arrow to hear the interview.

This weekend I head off with my husband to San Antonio to the IRA convention.  I will be signing FOREST on Sunday and on Monday, and am very excited to be presenting on a panel with Sylvia Vardell, Janet Wong, and Joyce Sidman on Monday as well.  Then, the following weekend...I'm back to Texas for the TLA conference.  Texas, here I come!

Today I am guest posting over at Caroline Starr Rose's blog, Caroline by line.  The topic?  Poem spools!

Next Tuesday, April 23, I will be a guest of Wonderopolis for this month's #WonderChat celebrating poetry and wonder.  This is the chat rescheduled from Monday evening, and I hope that you will be able to join us!

Today is Poetry Friday, and Irene Latham is hosting the festivities over at Live Your Poem. Visit her inspiring blog to find your way to this week's poetry goodies around the Kidlitosphere!

Please share a comment below if you wish.

To find a poem by topic, click here. To find a poem by technique, click here.

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R is for RESTORE

 

R is for RESTORE

Photo by Amy LV

Mark - My Science Guy

Photo by Amy LV

I knew right away what this poem would be about!  Due to the great planning of my sister-in-law, last week our family had the chance to visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History while we were in Massachusetts.  We saw gorgeous rocks and minerals, stuffed animals of all types, fascinating exhibits about ancient peoples, intricate weavings, and much more.  But what captured our hearts most were the museum art restorers working behind glass to clean an ancient Alaskan canoe.  With itty bitty sponges, they cleaned each bit of leather.  One woman told us about how such canoes were built, and her face simply shined.  I asked what she'd studied in college, and she said, "Chemistry and art history."  For a moment, I imagined myself having followed another path.

Students - This poem is a special form.  It is called a triolet.  You will notice that lines 1, 4, and 7 are the same, as are lines 2 and 8.  If you look carefully, you will also notice that the rhyme scheme is: abaaabab.

I recently wrote a two stanza triolet for the recent March Madness poetry tournament over at Think Kid, Think.  You can read it here if you want to see how our dog, Sage, really lives.

I have mentioned this before when speaking about forms of poetry, but if you missed it, and if you want to learn more about forms, don't miss Paul Janeczko's A KICK IN THE HEAD: AN EVERYDAY GUIDE TO POETIC FORMS.  I used Alice Schertle's The Cow's Complaint as my mentor for today's poem.  When writing in a specific form, it helps so much to have a poem stuck in your head, to light the pathway for your own words.

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In case you are new to The Poem Farm, this month I am walking, letter-by-letter, through the dictionary, (closed-eyed) pointing to a letter each day, and writing from it. You can read poems A-R by checking the sidebar, and you visit Lisa Vihos and read her accompanying daily haiku at Lisa's Poem of the Week. You can also follow Christophe's haiku with each daily word in the comments for that post.

If you have not yet taken a peek into Laura Shovan's notebook to see the evolution of her poem, April, please go and read her post at my other blog, Sharing Our Notebooks.  There is a giveaway on that post for her beautiful chapbook, MOUNTAIN, LOG, SALT, AND STONE.  Names will be drawn this evening!

Tomorrow is Poetry Friday!  Please come back to hear from Sylvia Vardell of Poetry for Children speak about  (and give away a copy of) her new book THE POETRY TEACHER'S BOOK OF LISTS!

Please share a comment below if you wish.

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History into Poetry: Luigi Del Bianco

Partway Knitted Tote Bag

Photo by Amy LV

Driving last Friday, I listened to a story from npr's Story Corps series. The story was about Luigi Del Bianco, the man who carved many of the details in Lincoln's Mount Rushmore face. His daughter, Gloria, shared her memories of her father with nephew Lou, and I was struck by this quote,

"And when I was little, my father wanted to carve me, but being the rambunctious, impatient child that I was, I wouldn't sit for him...And my mother would say, 'Please go sit for your father -- he won't keep you long, just a little bit.'"

I drove along the quiet roads of Alexander, NY thinking about this talented father wishing to immortalize his little girl. And I wanted to write about it. (You will notice the direct quote from Gloria in this poem.)

Students - At the top of this post, you may have wondered about why there is a photo of my current knitting project. Well, it's  going to be a tote bag, and it's knitted from scraps of yarn that I've had around the house. No need to go to the store for the yarn; it is old yarn. In the knitting world, we call this a stash.

So too, can we use "old yarn" for our poems. This world is full. Full of stories. The world is a stash! Every person you meet is a story-container. And so is every social studies book, each folded photograph, piece of clothing, or worn out tool. In any object or memory or person live unlimited possible-poems. We just have to go in there and get them! Faces from stone. Bags from old yarn. Poems from scraps of the past. We are makers, we humans.

Try this today. Open up your social studies book. Or an old one. Or any picture book that talks about the past. Remember something about the past that a family member once said. And open it up into poetry.

Teachers - in her book, PRACTICAL POETRY, Sara Holbrook discusses many ways to thread poetry through all of the disciplines. And with the new Common Core Standards, poetry is a beautiful way to incorporate writing in history, science, art, and math.

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This Monday at Literacy for All and later this month at the NCTE annual convention, I will speak about writing poems from and about history. With Karen Caine and Barry Lane (wait...my name doesn't rhyme!), I will share some ideas and resources for ways to weave poetry and history study. If you would like the handouts from these soon-to-be sessions, please just send me an e-mail to amy@amylv.com, and I will be happy to share them along.

If you're looking for a book just for you (or your YA students), I cannot recommend highly enough Allan Wolf's THE WATCH THAT ENDS THE NIGHT. This verse novel takes on 24 voices, from Captain to undertaker, refugee to Colonel. It is beautiful. It is haunting. It is on your to-be-read list.

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For more information about Luigi Del Bianco, visit the Mount Rushmore site or listen to his children talking about him in this YouTube video.

And to read more about using poetry with social studies, don't miss Sylvia Vardell's recent post at Poetry for Children - Notable Poetry in Social Studies or this one about poems of war and peace.

Laura Purdie Salas is hosting today's Poetry Friday at her sharp new WordPress blog, Writing the World for Kids. Thank you, Laura!

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I am Thinking about King Tut - Poem #245

Students - Yesterday I wanted to write a nonfiction poem.  So I went into our downstairs bathroom and lugged all of the old NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazines to the kitchen table.  What topic to choose?  King Tutankhamun stared out from the cover of September 2010, and I really had no choice but to write about him.  

I read this article about a recent DNA study of King Tut and his family, noting interesting facts in my notebook.  Doing so, I was struck by the contrast between Tut's glorious death trappings and his somewhat compromised health and early death.  This interested me and got today's poem rolling.  The photographs in this article are a bit creepy, but pretty fascinating too.  I do not want people to dig me up and study me after I'm gone...you hear that?

Two nights ago, our daughter Hope showed us some of her artwork, and her drawing of an Egyptian mummy stared out at me then too, almost begging to be written.  It was meant to be.

To revise this poem, I kept looking back at the articles for strong words.  For example, I changed "needed a walking stick" to "limped with a walking stick" because the word limped felt stronger than the word needed.

I need a little challenge.  So here it is - this will be my first week of nonfiction poems.  I will do a bit of research for each poem, and I'll share a nonfiction link with you if possible.

You can try this too...  Choose something you are studying in school or a nonfiction book you are reading on your own.  List interesting facts about this topic. Bend and twist them into a poem, remembering that you can take any form: mask, non-rhyming, list, story...  Play!

Teachers and Parents - last Poetry Friday was so close to Thanksgiving that I do not want you to miss teacher Amy Merrill's guest visit in which she shares her "Poetry Breaks" and also the importance of nursery rhymes.  Thank you again to Amy!

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