During lunch one day with the Poetry Club (3rd-5th graders), I talked about mentor texts, which teacher Kim Doele had already introduced them to. I shared a Rebecca Kai Dotlich poem I love and how I used it as a really strong mentor text.
Then I shared an excerpt from a lovely free verse poem I saw on Your Daily Poem recently:
From Porcupine
Powder puff with quills.
Hobo of the woods.
Queen of the rock piles.
Berry picker, leaf chewer, gnawer
of bark — canoe paddles if she’s hungry enough.
Spined pig.
Shadow sharpening its darkness.
Prickle bear.
–Ginny Lowe Connors, all rights reserved
I showed the kids pictures of a firework, a hummingbird, and a snake. I asked them questions like, what food does this remind you of? If this were weather, what would it be? And we wrote list poems renaming our selected item.
Here are a few of their favorite lines! Some of them shared their final versions here on the padlet, adding them in later, and a couple of them shared theirs out loud with me during a Poetry Club pizza party on the last day of my visit. They came up with some really stunning poems, didn’t they?
Wonderful! Great imaginations at work!
They blew me away:>)