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As a writer-in-residence in public schools, I understand the value of a step-by-step approach to writing. Using my own experience as well as wisdom from other writing teachers, I've developed the following reader's guides for each of my books. Click on each book for the related reader's guide. Please let me know how these lessons worked for you, or if you have further suggestions!

Read my article about teaching poetry from the Riverbank Review. Also, check out the Writers, Poem Starters, and Poetry Now! pages for more writing activities. And kids can submit poems for publication on my Young Voices page.

Click on each book for related activities. Feel free to copy these guides

for use in your classrooms or media centers.

Listen to Joyce read her poems.

This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness

(Grades 4 - 7)

Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow

(Grades 2 - 5)

MEOW RUFF: A Story in Concrete Poetry

(Grades K - 4)

Song of the Water Boatman

and Other Pond Poems

(Grades 2 - 5)

The World According to Dog:

poems and teen voices

(Grades 6 & up)

Eureka!

Poems About Inventors

(Grades 5 - 8)

Just Us Two:

Poems About Animal Dads

(Grades 2 - 5)

TOUCHING THE WORLD:

the importance of teaching poetry

by Joyce Sidman

(reprinted from the Spring 2002 issue of Riverbank Review)

I face a roomful of fifth or sixth graders on the first day of a week-long poetry residency armed with three things: an activated imagination, a handful of poems, and a random object from the classroom, like a stapler or a roll of tape. My goal is to lead these students into the mind-set of Muhammed al-Ghuzzi's poem, "The Pen":

Take a pen in your uncertain fingers.

Trust, and be assured

That the whole world is a sky-blue butterfly

And words are the nets to capture it.

We will get there by using the tools of close observation, sensory detail, and metaphor. Younger children live and breathe metaphor; it comes to them as naturally as speaking. Older children often must be reminded, so I read them Valerie Worth, who looks at earthworms and sees

New rubies

Dug out of

Deepest earth

and describes a beetle that

Keeps

Its precious

Innards

Packed in

A laquered

Coffer of

Curious

Compartments.

Why read them poems about worms and beetles? Because the physical world--and the profound lessons that direct contact with that world offers--have, sadly, receded into the background of their lives. Kids today don't get out much, either at school or in their leisure time. They may frequent the playground as young children, but after a certain age--roughly seven--they begin to conceptualize the world in their play, approach it through the virtual avenues of television, video games, and the Internet. If they want to find out about oak trees, they cruise the Web. If they want to play a game, they hit homers with a game pad, or build rollercoasters with a mouse. More often than not, the dominant images they view every day are created by other minds, other imaginations--with sometimes dubious motives

There are times when I want to leave the classroom behind, to haul my students--and myself--outside, just to feel the sunshine and smell the wind. To collect things that we usually take for granted or barely see: blades of grass, each with its own perfect symmetry and delicate tip, feathers from unknown birds, flowers from weeds, even dollops of mud. I want us to lie on our backs and notice how clouds fold together and curl apart, how the branches of trees are echoed in their leaves, how ants meet and kiss, exchanging mysterious information before continuing in opposite directions.

To fully engage myself and my students with the physical world, I turn to poetry: the reading of it, and, more importantly, the writing of it. Poetry, with its focus on the particular, can help restore rusty powers of observation, reawaken dulled senses, rekindle a latent sense of wonder. While it is not always possible to go out and find leaves and feathers, there are always--even in the classroom--opportunities to observe.

After Valerie Worth, I read Williams Carlos Williams:

Between Walls

the back wings

of the

hospital where

nothing

will grow lie

cinders

in which shine

the broken

pieces of a green

bottle

We talk about why, out of all the things pn earth he might choose, Williams writes about a bit of broken glass in a city alley. The tougher, more alienated students are especially fascinated by this poem: by the concept that someone--a poet, no less--might deliberately go looking for beauty in an ugly, abandoned place.

In the contemplative silence that follows, we pick up an object--any object--from their very ordinary, familiar classroom. I ask them questions. What does it look like? What does its shape remind them of? What could it be if it were huge? Tiny? Does it make noise? Does it smell like anything in particular? Might it have dreams--and if so, what would they be? I record their ideas on the board, then ask for volunteers to fashion sentences, incorporating all these wonderful details and metaphors. Thus we create a group poem that serves as a model, perhaps about a tape dispenser with "shiny, glistening jaws" or a piece of chalk that "sounds like the bones of a ghost" when it moves across the blackboard.

Emboldened, they choose an object and finger it, squint at it, frown. They consider color, purpose, possibilities. Then, with a bit of encouragement, they begin to write their own poems. I invite them to write in first person, taking on the voice of the object itself. Always, they surprise and delight me (and themselves) with images like these:

I am a tube, encasing soft stone.

I despise the feeling of teeth, boring into

my hide, chomping on my eraser.

(Pencil)

Sounds like money

jangling in one's pocket,

twinkling and twinkling as if stars

were planted in the heart of each sphere.

(Bracelet)

I am a frozen ice cream cone,

waiting to be licked.

A curious, alert ear,

listening to the crashing waves.

(Shell)

In talking with young poets about my own writing process, I often use the word obsessed. "I am currently obsessed with dogs," I'll say, and read them a dog poem. Or, "I've been obsessed with eggs for about a month now." I want them to see that it is natural it is for a poet to dive into something far deeper than they normally might, in order to discover its depths, its possibilities. Says poet John Moffit,

To look at anything,

If you would know that thing,

You must look at it long:

You must

Be the thing you see.

Sometimes we write our poems as riddles, then challenge each other to figure them out. Thus an electric fan becomes a "clover in a cage," and a kitchen timer is a "snow-white watermelon" with numbers for seeds. Or we'll choose objects we own that are very important to us, and write "bragging" poems about them: "My cello is as sleek as a galloping horse,/ its sound like a million tenors." A good starting point for bragging poems is Francis X. Alarcon's "Mariposa," from From The Bellybutton Of The Moon And Other Summer Poems (Children's Book Press).

Another way for students to steep themselves in the tangible is to begin with the intangible, as Emily Dickinson did. "Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul," she wrote, and "Grief is a Thief--quick startled." Middle school students are particularly adept at describing the miasma of emotion. If hope is a bird, I ask them, what would fear look like? Smell like? Taste like? How about Anger? Love? Boredom? As students tap each of their five senses, amazing images pour forth: "Silence is a burning candle eating up wax." "Depression knocks on your door/ With a sad grin on its face,/ pale yellow eyes,/ dressed in black." "Fear is a spider web inside my heart."

Poetry is subversive. These young poets start by writing about a hair brush or the quality of happiness, but end up writing about themselves:

A kepa is a little hat that Jews wear . . .

My kepa has my name sewed

with the best sewing by my grandma . . .

If a fire came to my house,

the red and orange flames devouring it,

I would save my kepa.

As the class moves through the week with ever sharpening powers of observation, we move closer to the personal. Reading work by poets as diverse as Arnold Adoff and Edna St. Vincent Millay, we write poems about important memories, people, and places of refuge--events and entities that have changed who we are. We use concrete images and sensory details to place the reader squarely in our shoes, and thus show the world what we see and feel.

My final challenge to young poets is to write a poem about themselves. The week's intense observation has opened up all kinds of doors. In rediscovering the things that are most familiar to them, they are now looking with fresh eyes at the both the world around them and the possibilities within themselves. Their final poems are often a wonderful, rich reversal of their first efforts, using tangible objects as metaphors for themselves:

I am a shell,

fragile and open

a stranger in the sands of time . . .

I feel like a book, always

being jammed into a locker . . .

I am a statue, perfectly still,

listening to what no one

thinks I can hear.

Children's poetry has never been stronger. Many excellent children's poets are publishing today--poets like Kristine O'Connell George, Nikki Grimes, Janet Wong, Paul Fleischman, and Douglas Florian--and teachers are using poetry in the classroom--not just in language arts, but in science, social studies, history. More poets are visiting schools to share their passion, and teenagers are discovering the joys of performance poetry and "slams."

Why this resurgence of interest in poetry? Maybe because, at this time in our society, we need it profoundly. We--and the children we care about--need the excuse to pause, stretch out our arms, and touch the world. To handle its lovely, mysterious objects and feel their power. To chase, with a gossamer net of words, that sky-blue butterfly--and capture both a piece of the world and a piece of ourselves.

Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors

(Grades K - 4)