Poetry Writers Workshop
This writers workshop series includes tutorials on writing a particular mode and genre with students. See the entire series here: personal narrative, short story, poetry, informational, personal argument, research-based argument, interviewing, descriptive paragraph, and comic.
This post is about writing poetry. A poem can take form in so, so many ways. We want students to play with the ways form impacts meaning and how meaning drives form. We also want students to write poetry all year long, which will have a profound impact on their reading and writing identities.
This poetry workshop is a 4-part tutorial.
Part 1 is a brief overview of poetry that begins, as all of these tutorials will, with gathering and exploring mentor texts. This means noticing the craft moves that poets make. I love experiencing mentor texts because it gives me permission not to be one version of a “good writer.” What I mean is that when you have so many amazing published poets in anthologies and in your classroom, you don’t have to be perfect. “Good” is finding your own voice, style, way. So teachers don’t have to be some ideal “good” writer, but they do have to be writers who try, who are trying to find their “good.” Bringing mentor texts into the classroom will show a way of being a writer, a way of trying.
Part 2 is gathering ideas from students’ notebooks and heartmaps for their poems but also offering many, many ideas for infusing poetry into the daily write-in or novel units that you do so that students can write poetry all year long.
Part 3 is support for teachers in modeling their own writing process with and alongside students. I show you two videos of me writing and talking about the decisions I am making while I write poetry. (These are in the slidedeck.) I encourage teachers to do this recording for themselves a few times to see how it feels and then to do live writing for student so the mystery and magic of poetry can be revealed as being a bit more messy (but still magical).
The final part offers ideas for planning your calendar to include poetry including how to set up a week to create chapbooks or anthologies.
These four parts get you to the drafting/revising, so then you can turn to the broader workshop tutorials for the next processes such as peer revision, grammar mini-lessons in-context, grading with standards, and the publication party! Check out those videos when you are ready.
Here are the slides for poetry to support your journey.
Check out all the poem prompts on our Open Writes.
Here is a unit on verse novels that was wonderful to do with students.
Please subscribe so that you receive emails about new poetry writing prompts.
And we hope teachers will join us each month to write poetry with other educators. Sign up here: https://forms.gle/TcFBrYD2ZcrbDfJK6
(Note: These tutorials are very short and not meant to be comprehensive. I hope you are inspired to do further inquiry and reach out if you’d like to learn about more resources and discuss how to implement writers workshop.)