A Weird Week in Poetry Workshop!

It's been a strange week in room 131.  We started off strong, exploring the theme of growing up. We also kicked off our poetry mini project, which will be like a mini panel presentation on a poet of everyone's choice.  On Monday students each picked a poet to research for the next three Mondays and then present to the class on the fourth week.  Here are some of their picks:

Independent Poet Research Project

Later on in the week we did a quickwrite starting with the phrase, "He didn't mean to do it"... we got some interesting responses. A riddle from Dylan, another poem from Veronica and some cliff-hangers from other members of the class.

Wednesday we talked about punctuation, line break and repetition in poetry, using William Stafford's poem "Fifteen".  We explored Stafford's use of repetition and talked about the deeper meaning in the poem.  The plan was to then read "Nikki- Rosa" by Nikki Giovanni and begin our own poems about childhood and adolescence, but since the view out our classroom window looks like this:

I only have about 33% attendance today on this Nor'Easter Thursday so we're using the day as a "flex day" to catch up on blog posts, do further research on the poets of our choice and working on our most recent homeowrk which is to annotate a new "reading on writing" called, "On Poetry and the Reallocation of Concentration: Learning to Forget" by Beth Ann Fennelly.  It's a big of a complicated piece but should push them to think about writing 

Hopefully tomorrow more students will show up and keep me company and we can discuss the piece and get back on track with our writing workshop. We won't get to do much feedback on each others' writing, but it will be nice to end the Friday before Spring Break with writing poetry.  Until next time, happy break!