In class writing, Alexander Valley School

Demo acrostic/conceptual noun personification exercise board poem for the kids at Alexander Valley School. What usually happens, is that we write a phrase on the board, then they're off writing their own poems, but I've got a fragment on the board. So I freewrite them, finish them off in class, modeling the process.  We were reading Emily Dickinson's Hope is a Thing with Feathers.

Joy is a daisy
   dancing in the wind
on the horizon of hope
   it sings of
your heart and soul.

5/13/2016


Hope is a bluejay
inside your heart
dancing to its own beat
a blue heart blushes,
it burns with love.

5/13/2016
4th Grade class


Hope is a white bird
flying through the starry night
Hope is a swan of many colors
as quiet as fireflies in the clouds.

5/13/2016
3rd Grade class


Joy is the birds
   singing so hard
   the lemon tree shakes
   like a dancer
on the moon, where
   coyotes serenade the stars
Yonder, in an empty field
   owls drift down like petals.

5/13/2016
2nd Grade class


Once I was the flames of the head
I became the ice of fire
I was the river of ice
I dreamed of love in the sea
I will become the sun shining on the earth.

5/12/2016
3rd Grade class


Once I believed the world was flat
I thought that if I went past the fence
where the milk box was
that I would fall
through an invisible wall
a well into another world
where it was dark, but similar
and there was no way back up
no latter, no rope.
Even though the sun rose,
and heated the milk
I wouldn't get it and it sat in the box
until it curdled and separated
a floating world
of curds and clouds.

5/12/2016
4th Grade class
This is from the I used to believe...early memory exercise.
I started revising it here, so I moved it to a new page
FLOATING WORLD