Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Slice of Life-Of bricks, chalk, and poetry


Every Tuesday, the writing community of Two Writing Teachers hosts Slice of Life. All are welcome to participate by linking up posts or commenting on other participants. 


Our Summer Writing Academy featured poetry, and it was one of my favorite weeks of teaching writing I've ever had. Students read poems, found poems, created poems, and wrote their own poems, and the learning and inspiration that happened from studying words and language so closely was incredible to watch. 

We had a short celebration at the end of the week to share some of the work the students did. Summer is for fun, so we tried hard to incorporate play into the world of our writing. One of those play elements involved sidewalk chalk as a forum for sharing and celebration. Students loved writing their poems on the blacktop, and some of them even got creative with the bricks. Poems and words filled the red bricks of the school wall. Some of the students even created an elaborate and well-engineered pencil that directed and welcomed parents and guests to our poetry celebration. The caption was welcome to the wonder of our writers. 



Unfortunately, the custodians didn't think the brick poetry was as good an idea as we did. I have some advice for all you would-be writers of poetry on bricks--think hard before you allow odes to appear on bricks.. Chalk is a little sticky when it's on red clay.  After listening to the custodians review their summer work lists which did not include scrubbing the outside walls of the school, I volunteered myself and my daughter to come back and remove the poetry (although I do think there could be worse things on the walls of an elementary school!).

Larkin and I had great exercise scrubbing the pencil, the words of welcome, and all the other poems that so happily decorated the bricks.



Happy Writing,

6 comments:

  1. Ooops! It was all for a good cause! I could picture the joy of the students and the dismay of the custodians. Who knew that chalk would be hard to take off- I would have guessed that the next rain would have taken care of it.

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  2. Ooops! It was all for a good cause! I could picture the joy of the students and the dismay of the custodians. Who knew that chalk would be hard to take off- I would have guessed that the next rain would have taken care of it.

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  3. It feels that they could have left those wonderful words, but I guess then it would have encouraged more. Love all the poetry ideas, that you did some extraordinary poetic things with those summer kids!

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  4. Love the magic of poetry . . . and yet, I too can imagine the dismay of the custodians. Great idea!

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  5. Love the magic of poetry . . . and yet, I too can imagine the dismay of the custodians. Great idea!

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  6. Maybe next year kids can bring a brick with them to write on and take home to keep somewhere in their own garden... But wow did your school look cool, right?
    Bonnie K.

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