Hello, friends,
I hope you had a good week last week. I hope you’re feeling well, and that the people you love are feeling well, too.
This week’s poetry work is focused on a strange pairing: imagery and concision.
It seems like imagery is requisite for any kind of poetry study. However, I find that most students somehow thing imagery = lots of adjectives. They have trouble describing the precise images they see in poems and they have trouble creating poignant images that still retain the tightness of an excellent poem. So, we’re thinking about how poets show us a movie sometimes inside a poem and how they do that concisely.
(Please note: I had initially shared these as live docs so that you could easily edit for your students. However, people were changing links and other elements of the original documents, so I am now sharing as PDFs.)
- We’re looking at one of my favorite poems to share with students for the mini-lesson: “Yellowjackets” by Karen J. Weyant. Then, students will try to find a tiny moment or picture and write it as a poem:
- For the annotation options this week, students are thinking about imagery in “Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry and “Allowables” by Nikki Giovanni. I really want them to see that poems don’t have to be long to have powerful images in them.
- In this week’s discussions, we’re pairing the poems in different ways to compare and contrast them. (You’ll need to make your own Flipgrid links, of course!
- We’re thinking about vivid verbs and the way they help create images in “Yellowjackets” and “Peace of Wild Things”.
Week 3 _ Discussion Option 1_ _Yellowjackets_ & _Peace of Wild Things_
- We’re thinking about word choice and endings in “Yellowjackets” and “Allowables”.
We hope this helps you and your students this week! We’re excited thinking about the drafts students are creating, which we will polish up in a one-week writing workshop in a few weeks!
Take care of yourselves,
Rebekah
moving writers 