Greetings and salutations, friends. Happy Poetry Friday! This week, I’m celebrating the launch of my second book for children, TAKEDOWN. (Read a review at the Nerdy Book Club.) I think of this novel as a friendship story set in the world of youth wrestling.It’s told by two sixth graders: Mikayla, who wants to be a wrestler […]

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It’s time to say goodbye to Northfield Elementary, friends. Last week was our poetry celebration and tomorrow is the last day of school. Our third grade poets wrote list poems based on a model from Naomi Shihab Nye, odes to their favorite places, and retold fairy tales. At the celebration, I get to see the […]

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Hi, Poetry Friday friends. Welcome back to my series of posts from Northfield Elementary’s third grade poetry residency. It’s day two of our fractured fairy tale poems. In the last post, I described the beginning of our workshop. Today’s I’m sharing the brainstorming worksheet I use for this lesson. The key to this poem is […]

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Hello, poetry friends! Welcome back to Northfield Elementary School. Today, the third graders are sharing some of their fractured fairy tale poems. This is an exercise in point of view. We started the workshop by gathering in groups, each assigned to a classic fairy tale. The students brainstormed a list of characters in, for example, […]

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Tomorrow is the poetry celebration at Northfield Elementary School. The student poets are welcoming family and friends for a reading and poetry tour of the five third grade classrooms. I’ve been doing an elementary school workshop on odes for many years. This time around, I swapped out my usual model poem and got these poets […]

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