I am from a dream a night

We've been writing I am From poems. Some excerpts:

By Amalia
With a little cold wind
I’ll whirl and twirl
around until
I’m
very
dizzy,
giggling with my girls.

By Tia
I hear
whining
in the morning.
My skin is like
chocolate butter cups.

By Alex
I am from China to
become a ninja warrior so I can
meet my grandpa that had
died a long time ago
I just
don’t live
in
Chinatown
I live
in
Boston
in
my neighborhood
I hear
baseball games
around the
corner and
trucks rumbling
and kids
skateboarding
at the
park
I even
hear ice cream
trucks.

By Pria
I am from a
dream a night
I am from a
smile
I am from
the sun

By Aliyah
I am from cold coffee ice cream.
nice dark coffee ice twisted coffee
ice cream. don’t leave me in the sun or
I will melt like a raindrop

By Jarad
I’m from
the music
that Ms. Swamp
plays
salsa
Spanish
English
violins
all day

By Jada
I am from my mom’s stomach
like peanut butter is from peanuts.
I am the color of peach coladas.

By Raheem
I’m from Jamaica
where the wind blows in the night
and sun shines in the day. and
in the morning I hear drums
every day. and crickets chirping in late
days and I hear coyotes howling in
the evening. and I feast on Jamaican beef
patties all day. and people have parties in the
morning and they blast music all night.

The scent of burgers and hot dogs and chicken.
Dogs barking in the afternoon.

Words needed during poetry workshop

"What do crickets do -- do they screech or howl?"

The Too Rough Fingers of the World

I was looking online for the text of Langston Hughes' poem "The Dream Keeper," which we've been reading this week. (It is incomparable.)

I found this. It is definitely worth a read.

Student Poems

Here are few of our first original poems. Not everyone has line breaks down, so I'm copying them as they are, even though many of these line breaks are not purposeful (they just wrote until they ran out of space.)

The ceiling is like a cloud in the blue sky shifting across the sky. (unfinished)

Music is in hip hop and
soul or smooth rock
when my mom is going to
sleep she tells me to turn
it off but I just make
it louder music is my thing.

Undertaker (Undertaker is a WWF wrestler, I think)

There goes Undertaker
leg drop...
There goes Undertaker
last ride...
There goes Undertaker
old school...
There goes Undertaker
choke slam...
There goes Undertaker
tombstone.

My mom smells like a blossom when I eat her chicken
the crust is crispy the meat is tasty
she spends her money on me and my baby sister
She gives me money on my birthday her pan-
cakes are moist and good her bacon is crusty

Basketball

They pass it to me in the lane,
and my knee is in a lot of pain
I make the and-one
the fans say "that's the game!"

Ray Allen

Ojo passes it
Ray dunks it
Ojo gets
Ray makes
Yeah Ray go

The ice cream man

The ice cream man
never steps out his
truck is it just
because of a
angry old man, approaching
the ice cream man?
He steps on the brake
as if he was in a race
and he never turns
back he leads the
police on a high speed
chase, and that's mostly that.

The last one is my favorite. I love the angry old man, approaching the ice cream man.

What is it about poetry? Their natural sense of rhythm and language and powerful words emerges so naturally.

Jarad

We have been memorizing poems, and today a number of students bravely performed their poems, alone, in front of the whole lower school at Community Meeting. Jarad, usually a quiet, reserved kid, stole the show with his recitation of a poem about Mohamed Ali that starts, "Well, I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee..."

On the way back up the stairs to class, I heard him asking his classmates, one after the other: "Which poem do you think I should learn next: the one about Martin Luther King, or the one about Malcolm X?" By recess time, it was a formal survey, complete with clipboard.

I think probably either one would do.

Art and Poetry

Today we read "Invitation," by Shel Silverstein.

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
come in!

I thought it was a hard poem to understand. We started by asking questions about it, because I told them that when you read a hard poem, you ask yourself questions about it.

Who is he inviting in?
Where is he inviting them?
What are "flax-golden tales?"
Who is he calling a liar? Why? (That word had a big impact on them.)
What inspired him to write this poem?

And then some students had some answers, and some surprisingly good ones. (I know, I shouldn't be shocked when they are thoughtful. I mean, I've known them to be quite smart and insightful for two years now, right?)

"I think he's inviting us into our imaginations," Aliyah said immediately. Wow.

"Why?" I asked. "What's your evidence?"

"Because he talks about dreaming, and wishing," she answered.

"I think it's about making up stories," Pria suggested. "Because he talks about spinning 'flax-golden tales,' and tales are like stories."

The idea then surfaced that he was inviting people to sit by a campfire (since he says "sit by my fire,") -- that it was about a camping trip, and they were telling stories around a campfire and roasting marshmallows. Ah well, can't completely escape the literal second-grade mind.

We talked about fairy tales, because that's what spinning "flax-golden tales" evoked in our minds (we thought about Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rumplestilstken, and other stories in which spinning figures), and because they asked about a "magic bean buyer" and we remembered Jack and the Beanstalk.

Ramon understood the poem deeply, from the beginning. He raised his hand over and over again, driven to share his ideas about imagination, inviting people in, and stories.

"You really understand poetry, and you really like it, don't you?" I asked him, smiling as I looked down at him on the rug.

"Yes," he answered.

"You know, I used to want you to go to art school," I said (because he is a very talented artist). "But now I want you to grow up and go to poetry school."

Instantly, he replied, "But poetry is like art."

"It is like art," I agreed, my smile widening and my heart getting a little fluttery at his marvelousness. "What do you mean? How are they the same?"

"When you write a poem, it's like making something up, the same as when you draw a picture or tell a story," he said. "And it's using your imagination."

If ever I thought poetry was too hard for second graders, I learned my lesson right then and there.