Happy Poetry Friday! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) [My Classroom Connections posts will share a way to connect one of my books or poems to a classroom topic–often something timely that you might be covering in the next month or so. Please share this post if you have educator friends who might be […]
Statues in the Park, Round 2 [Poetry Friday]
Happy Poetry Friday! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) A couple of weeks ago, the Poetry Princesses shared poems written to the title “Statues in the Park.” I shared my poem and writing process (via time lapse video) in that post. Today, I thought I’d share one of the other poems that came out […]
Revenge of the White Dragon [Poetry Friday]
Happy Poetry Friday! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) I realize this poem is not seasonally appropriate, but this week I’ve been reading about 2015’s disastrous Mt. Everest avalanche, and it made me think of this acrostic I wrote years ago. Revenge of the White Dragon (An Acrostic) A dragon wakes, his winter sleep […]
A Plea from the Invisible–a Diversity Acrostic by Laura Purdie Salas
I was honored to have a poem in Dragon Lode not too long ago. Janet Wong wrote a great piece about diversity, and she included poems by both Margarita Engle and me. I keep some pretty great company, right? Here’s my poem–in one of my favorite forms, the acrostic! I was just an average middle-class […]
Tip #17: Give a Line Some Space [and 15 Words or Less Poems]
Welcome to today’s tip in my month-long Poetry Tips for Teachers series. Tip #17: Give a line some space. One approach to reading poems aloud is to do a slight pause at the end of each line, whether there is punctuation there or not. That’s the identifying factor of poetry, after all. Poets break their […]
Alaska: Night Lights: a 50 State Poems Poem
Happy Poetry Friday! Here’s another poem from my latest 30 Painless Classroom Poems book, Wacky, Wild, and Wonderful: 50 State Poems. Note: The Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis, are usually visible only in the far North. They can be many colors and shapes. Various Indian tribes in Alaska and Canada have at times believed that […]
Poetry Friday: After the Storm (by me)
Roger Sutton recently posted about Poetry Tag Time, the e-anthology brilliantly created by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong to try to make poetry more accessible and get it into more classrooms. 30 fun and fantastic kids’ poems for only 99 cents! So I thought I’d share my poem from it here and encourage you all to […]
Last Week of Summer: Poem 3 (#2 Wand)
I’m celebrating the last week of summer with poems about school! Here’s poem #3. #2 Wand PointedEnds write lettersNeat–Caging magicIn Lines onSheets –Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved And Stampede! got a nice mention on the PlanetEsme Plan. Yay!
Poetry Friday: Acrostics
I love to write acrostics–they’re fun and they often come fairly easily. But not always. Stop by Kid Magazine Writers to see my Meter Readers column, Acrostics: Poetry, Top to Bottom. In it, I share my process and also some of my struggles And here’s one of my acrostics from the article, which I was […]
Poetry Friday: Written in the Stars (original poem)
I’ve been thinking about a variation on acrostics this week. They’re called phrase acrostics, and I hadn’t really heard of them until an instructor mentioned them in a poetry class I was taking last year at the Loft Literary Center. When she explained that you take a phrase or quotation and write a poem […]