A walk through the Middle School on a Thursday morning in April revealed closed doors and quiet corridors. Yet, inside many classrooms, an electrifying activity was taking place: Poetry writing!
In honor of National Poetry Month, students in Classes 5 and 6 spent a recent cross-grade Community Time exploring a dizzying array of poetic forms and styles and crafting original poems filled with humor, whimsy, and tenderness.
In each of nine pre-arranged groups, faculty members provided a brief overview of a specific type of poetry and offered examples and encouragement as the students embarked on their own pieces. Excitement filled the air as the young poets settled around tables with pencils, markers and construction paper and unleashed their imaginations.
Participants in Room 712, for example, celebrated the art of the limerick. Chatting and giggling with one another, they clearly enjoyed writing their charming five-line verse patterns, including this one:
I adopted a dog
his name was Bob
I took him to the park
and he did not talk
Then I realized he was a
Rock
Down the hall, the writers in Room 704 used old sheets of newspaper, black Sharpies and bottles of White-Out to create blackout poems. By eliminating substantial chunks of text, they left choice words behind, arriving at surprising results. A powerful exercise indeed.
On the sixth floor, students discovered a captivating technique that was equal parts language and visual art. To construct concrete poems, they brought an object to life by employing descriptive words to form the object’s outline or characteristic details. With careful pencils, the students drew poems shaped like an eye, a bottle, the moon, and even a Nike sneaker. Around the corner, the wordsmiths in Room 615 hunted for nouns and adjectives within a multi-lettered word, similar to a word-find puzzle, then built lively poems with these found ingredients.
Still more students practiced writing acrostic poems, in which the first letters of each line spell out a word or a phrase; two-voice poems with contrasting points of view; and poems with varying rhyme schemes like couplets and triplets. The last group, in Room 604, tried their hand at composing free verse. They were welcome to experiment with any kind of open poetry – without rhymes or rhythmic patterns – and were invited to use the theme “my dreams for the future” as inspiration. One student’s free verse read like this:
At the
rising of the sun
I am
at home once more
Colors around me
Say welcome
After the energizing period, the proud poets continued on to their next classes, maybe with a bit more exuberance, while Associate Head of Middle School Trude Goodman displayed samples of their excellent work on a bulletin board for all to admire.
The Middle School’s poetry celebration continued with an uplifting Assembly on the morning of April 26. As the students entered the Assembly Room for the first Assembly in that space in more than two years, a colorful National Poetry Month poster declared, “There’s a poem in this place.”
In fact, there were countless poems being shared as students in Classes 4, 5, 6 and 7 enjoyed the chance to recite their original verses and read aloud the works of notable poets like Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, Carl Sandberg, Li Bai and Chapin’s own Humanities teacher Elvis Alves, who is the author of several volumes of poetry. As this jubilant and moving Assembly beautifully demonstrated, poetry is alive and well in the Middle School. Happy National Poetry Month!
