Teaching Poetry Spring 2007: Lesson #8 — Place Poems

Today, we gathered up our "Life Story Collection" worksheets and wrote some place poems. The process is simple:

1. Fill in a worksheet with things common to your life. Things included family, objects, foods, sports and recreation, plants, people, sounds, etc.
2. Write a poem and begin each line with "I am from...", then fill in the rest with an item or items from the list.

What's left is a poem that sounds like such:

I am from cookies and roses
I am from AC/DC and Maroon5
I am from Sally and Ted

The students were encouraged to expand and play with the form, something like this:

I am from cookies and roses,
fresh and sweet
and tended by mom.

Not many of the students expanded, but most created really cool poems.

* This entry is post-dated from 8 May 2007