The Busy City: Playing with Noise in Poetry

 I want to share something really cool that formed in class today. We had been talking about noises in poems — noisy things, words we liked the sound of, onomatopoeia — and decided to write a group poem about a crazy, noisy city night. Everyone, including me, was given a small slip of paper. We eachContinue reading “The Busy City: Playing with Noise in Poetry”

James Bond and the Past Perfect: teaching grammar through poems

As I was organizing things for the first class of the year yesterday, I found a gem from the archives. We had been learning about the past perfect tense and how weird it is to try to write in it in any extended way. Instead of just blabbing at the kids about this, I hadContinue reading “James Bond and the Past Perfect: teaching grammar through poems”

The Homonym List

Writing about puns got me thinking about homonyms, which made me think of The Homonym List. My little sister was a math kid. She used to put pictures of the math books she had finished in the photo cover of her school binder, where most people put pictures of horses or Christian Slater. (Did I just dateContinue reading “The Homonym List”

The Picture/Caption Game

Here’s a great game for all those boring travel moments. All you need is a few pieces of paper (or receipts or envelopes or old boarding passes) and a few pens, pencils, crayons, or Hello Kitty Multi Color Pens — whatever you’ve got. Adults enjoy it, kids enjoy it, pre-literate people can play too, andContinue reading “The Picture/Caption Game”