I'm leaving this evening for Portland, where I'll spend two days as a visiting poet at a K-5 elementary school. My schedule is crazy--14 half-hour classes in 2 days--but lots of teachers signed up for workshops, which made me happy, and I decided that I'd rather handle numerous individual classes as opposed to a few giant mixed-age groups. I think kids are generally more comfortable about public participation when they are working in a familiar setting, and younger kids are always intimidated by older kids, who, in turn, enjoy showing off for the younger kids, so classes run a good chance of being a waste of time for everyone.

Because I'm working in tight half-hour segments, I'll need to jettison my usual, more leisurely reading-discussion-writing cycle. We'll do a quick exercise with May Swenson's "Cardinal Ideograms," a poem that imagines numerals as physical objects, which is one of my favorite ways to move children (and their teachers) into the idea of language as a vehicle for invention. Then each class will write a group poem. 

A few teachers did email me with information about what their classes have been studying (electricity, dinosaurs, etc.), so in those classes we'll use some of that familiar specialist vocabulary and imagery to jumpstart the poems. For classes in which teachers did not offer specific subject matter, I've decided to focus on "spring" (K-2) and "personification of item in classroom" (5).

Seasons may seem like a dull subject, but kids are very aware and excited by the physical changes that are happening around them. Moreover, everyone in the class has equivalent knowledge, so everyone can participate. And seasons, because they have specific concrete "symptoms," also have a built-in structure, which helps kids stay on topic (a major issue for young writers). For the spring poems, I might ask kids to build the poem from the ground to the sky, or vice versa, another subtle yet really useful way to help kids deal with organizational issues in their writing. (It works with older students as well.)

  

Fifth graders are beginning to develop a more complex understanding of metaphor, so personification poems are always fun for them. And this exercise presses them to focus on physical comparisons (e.g., how does a pencil sharpener move/think/look like a person?) rather than wander off into intangibles . . . a teenage problem that is worth circumventing early.

Anyway, wish me luck. I may be a jellyfish by Tuesday afternoon.