Yesterday we worked on writing our own Where I'm From Poems. We started by looking at a template and a couple of student examples from this PDF: https://www.sps186.org/downloads/attachments/44633/Where%20I%20am%20From.pdf
Then we reread our own lists from the last session and broke into writing partners for a "turn and talk." I provided the following prompts if partners wanted to use them.
- What are three things from your list that you want to include? Why?
- What from the list might lead to its own piece of writing?
- What from your list do you think might be most important to where you are from?
I didn't suggest marking the items to include, but probably should have. Neither my partner or I were ready to tackle the third question. I set the timer for six minutes and that seemed about the right amount of time for both partners to share for everyone.
After going over the guidelines below we each drafted our own poems.
- Multi stanza and free verse
- Each stanza starts with "I am from . . ."
- Rearrange and/or extend from your list
- Use sensory imagery
- An idea for pulling it all together at the end?
I put the template from the PDF up again on the screen during writing time, and some of the writers found it useful and others found it too much like a Mad Libs with only nouns as an option. I found it helpful as a framework to get started writing, but didn't follow it exactly. I didn't like that the template includes lines directly from George Ella Lyon's original poem.
We had the longest drafting/writing time during the workshop, and while the participants had a variety of degrees of satisfaction with their results, everyone seemed to spend the time writing.
Our next session will be focused on revision.
As homework please watch "Simile School" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT6_PXXjU94
Also, in addition to the student examples on the PDF linked above, several video examples are on George Ella's web page: http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html
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