Happy Poetry Friday, everyone! Catherine at Reading to the Core is our hostess this week. She has a wonderful preview of the latest in Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong’s Poetry Friday Anthology series, Great Morning! Poems for School Leaders to Read Aloud. I, for one, can’t wait to see this collection IRL and share with my principal. This will be the first year we have Morning Announcements and I think a copy will make the perfect gift for her. Don’t you? Congratulations to Catherine, who also has a poem in the book, “Walking for a Cause.” Hooray!
During the summer months, many educators are reading Sara K. Ahmed’s brilliant book Being The Change: Lessons and Strategies to Teach Social Comprehension (Heinemann, 2018). In her chapter “Exploring Our Identities,” Sara suggests having students craft their own “Where I’m From” poems, featuring details about their identity. This idea originally stemmed from George Ella Lyon’s poem “Where I’m From.” (You can read more about Lyon’s original poetry challenge here.) What a wonderful exercise for students to focus in on what has been meaningful to them in their lives, and has helped shape their identity.
I’ve been playing around with this challenge all summer, digging deep into the memories of my childhood. There are so many! Which to use? These are the handful that rose to the top of the heap.
If you’ve tried a “Where I’m From,” I’d love to hear about your journey!
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Thanks for visiting and join us for some Poetry Friday fun!
Magical memories you have there, Christie! Your tactile details are wonderful.
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I love each part, especially that “bottom of a tin bucket filling up”. I have still never written one, Christie, and like how people approach them. What fun it would be to have students write their own at the year’s beginning!
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Christie, this is beautiful…..the difficult indeed. Many lines take me right back to my childhood too….melted crayons, playing school, and those tree roots I haven’t remembered in years and years. Thanks for sharing your journey.
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I love your specific word choice throughout your piece. “Unairconditioned,” “chugging,” kerplink, kerplunk,” and many more! I tried this toward end of year w/my fourth graders and most of them enjoyed the process. I did worry that they might fall short on “memories” being 9 and 10; however, overall, I needn’t have worried. I made copies of some S work to use as mentors for next year. Here’s a link to mine: https://wp.me/p94Tsb-vC
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It’s such fun to read these and get a peek into a person’s past (how did that make you who you are?).
Here’s one I wrote a while ago:
http://www.maryleehahn.com/2010/04/where-im-from.html
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I like how you bring up such interesting and unexpected imagery as you starting point for each memory (ie.seats, bucket, roots). Thanks for sharing your poem.
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This is wonderful, Christie! I can hear those blueberries and feel the coolness as you slip into the woods. I wrote a “Where I’m From” poem for a course I took several years ago. I’ll have to look for it. Thank you for sharing!
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Love this, Christie! My favorite lines are “Where moss is damp and cool on a hot summer day/
And the hope of fairy spotting lives on.” To me that just captures so much of childhood. It was great to meet you yesterday! (I’ll send along the photo, I promise!)
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What a wonderful form, encouraging writers to really think and draw on past experiences. Yours is delightful. I want to see that secret opening in the woods.
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Nice! I love doing these with my students. Ruth, thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com
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