Happy Poetry Friday! I’m saying goodbye to Northfield Elementary School this week. For the past month, I’ve been conducting a poetry residency with the school’s third grade. At the bottom of this post, I’m sharing a gallery of some of the poetry displays. The kids outdid themselves this year! Our final workshop was on persona […]
Classroom Workshop
Thursday, 1 June 2017
Thursday, 1 June 2017
Today is the poetry open house at Northfield Elementary, where I’ve been in residence for the past month. I haven’t seen the third grade poets since our revision day. It’s always exciting to read their poems again and see how they have developed. Let’s look more closely at persona poems. When we’re creating a character, […]
Tuesday, 30 May 2017
June is almost here! This week, the Northfield 3rd Grade poets, their teachers, and families, will be celebrating poetry at our annual open house. It’s a great time to recognize how hard the students have worked on their poems. I’ve shared the poets’ haiku and food poems. Today, I am posting the third graders’ […]
Thursday, 25 May 2017
Last weekend, I visited my home state for NerdCampNJ. (Hey, Jersey! Looking good.) There’s no better way to spend a rainy Saturday than surrounded by educators, authors, and super readers. One of the highlights of my day was co-leading a workshop: Building Literacy with Poetry and Books in Verse. You can find notes from the workshop […]
Friday, 19 May 2017
It’s Poetry Friday! Welcome back to Northfield Elementary, where the third grade poets are using their five senses to write about food. When I’m working with young writers on food poems, I want to guide them away from catch-all words: delicious, yummy, tasty, good, disgusting. Pizza and ice cream are both delicious, but they don’t […]
Friday, 12 May 2017
Happy Poetry Friday, Readers. It’s May, my month to serve as poet-in-residence at Northfield Elementary School. This is my longest running residency through the Maryland State Arts Council. 11 years! When I had my orientation meeting with third grade educators this year, they had important information for me. This year’s 3rd graders are active. They […]
Monday, 14 November 2016
Heading to NCTE this weekend? So am I. My first job after graduate school was teaching high school English. I was a member of the New Jersey Council of Teachers of English, but I never got to a national conference. Educator friends have told me how good it feels to be surrounded by people who […]
Thursday, 26 May 2016
Today was the poetry open house at Northfield Elementary School. It was an emotional day. I’ve been poet-in-residence at this school for ten years. The third grade teachers’ stories about how our poetry workshops have impacted their students, and their own teaching throughout the year, were so moving. There were lots of tears and hugs. […]
Wednesday, 25 May 2016
We’re wrapping things up at Northfield Elementary. Our third and final poetry workshop focused on odes. Tone is a difficult literary concept. The website Literary Devices defines it this way: “Tone, in written composition, is an attitude of a writer toward a subject or an audience. Tone is generally conveyed through the choice of words or […]
Monday, 23 May 2016
Greetings, poets and friends. The Northfield third graders are working on imagery today, by focusing on our five senses. The five senses are an important tool in communication, whether you are telling a story to friends at the lunch table, or writing a poem. Appealing to your audience’s senses creates that “you are there” feeling. Using […]
Laura Shovan is the author of the award-winning middle grade novel, The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary. Her second book, Takedown, is a Junior Library Guild and PJ Our Way selection. Look for A Place at the Table, co-written with Saadia Faruqi, in 2020. Laura is a poet-in-the-schools Maryland.
