1. Writer’s Workshop Launching – Day 5
Teaching Point: Writers experiment with possible poem ideas using previous notebook entries.
Active Engagement: We will read the poem “On the Way to School” by Charles Ghigna and write our own poems that emulate his topic.
Independent Practice: Now spend time going through your notebooks and annotating the places where your thoughts could be made into a poem. Look for key lines, words & phrases that elicit a strong image, emotion or moment. Highlight, circle, and underline these places in your notebook. When you are satisfied, turn to your elbow partner and discuss the potential topics for your narrative poem.
Homework: Write a poem that tells a story about one of the topics you found when you looked back through your journal.
Remember the elements of Narrative Poems!
- Next session, we will play with narrative structure and use our mentor poems to guide us in imitating various poetry structures in our own writing.
- Writers of poetry revisit their previous notebook entries to mine for small moments that can become poems.
- Poems can be created from a variety of places. Poetry comes from the ordinary, everyday life. Poems come from strong feelings and emotions.
- They are born of social justice issues, needing to understand people and relationships.
- Poems are another form of expressing an idea, a concept, a wish or a dream.