PENCIL TIPS: THE WRITING GARDEN

by Mary Quattlebaum

As the weather warms and eyes turn from page or screen to the greening world, a field trip can help enhance students’ writing skills and pleasure.

And you need not travel far.  Many schools today have created small gardens or grounds that can be used as outdoor classrooms.  Alive with plants, pollinators, and regional wildlife, these green spots offer hands-on and real-life lessons in math, science, natural history, geography, literature, and the arts.  You can also take a beyond-school writing trip to a public garden.

1.  In the classroom, prepare students by sharing poems or descriptions of plants, insects, and birds.  What details make the writing vivid?  Did the writer like or dislike this thing?  (See below for some of my favorite poems/descriptions.) 

2.  As a class, have them list things they think they will find in the garden.

3.  Have them bring their writer’s journals and pencils outdoors and challenge them to (1) look for the things they thought they would find, (2) add details (such as color, name, smell, texture, sound, and so on to “flower,” “butterfly,” or “bird,” for example), and (3) write down things/details they hadn’t expected.

4.  In the classroom, discuss their findings.  What were some surprises?  What one natural thing did they find most interesting?  Why?

5.  Ask them to write a short description or poem that includes specific details and three of the five senses.  For younger kids, you might also have them draw/color a picture and post their writings/drawings in the classroom for an “indoor garden.”

For more information on creating or teaching with a school garden, check online resources offered by the National Wildlife Federation www.nwf.org/schoolyard and National Gardening Association www.kidsgardening.org.

Some favorite garden poems/descriptions:

“Orchids,” “Weed Puller,” “Old Florist,” and “Moss-Gathering,” by Theodore Roethke in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.

“Petaling” and “Me Boy. You Plant.” by Heidi Mordhorst in Pumpkin Butterfly.

 “You Never Hear the Garden Grow,” “The Nest,” “Cricket” in The 20^th Century Children’s Poetry Treasury, edited by Jack Prelutsky.

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DIALOGUES AND TWO PERSON POEMS

by Mary Quattlebaum

Have you ever read dialogue that feels rambling and flat?  (Ha, sometimes I’ve written such dialogue and then, of course, had to revise.)  To help students think more carefully about the point of and voices in a piece of dialogue, try this:

*Have students make up one big and one very small character (for example, seagull and tiny crab, child and ant, cat and mouse).  One wants something that the other has (for example, the gull might want to eat the crab; or the ant might want child’s cupcake crumb).  What do they say to one another?  How are their voices different?  (For example, the gull might be rude and the crab very polite.  Or the ant, though tiny, might be very bossy and the child apologetic.)  What happens and how does the dialogue end? 

*Once students have written and revised their dialogues or two-speaker poems, have them pair up with someone in class and speak/perform the part of their two characters.  Have fun!

Below is an example of a two-speaker or dialogue poem. In “Encounter,” a girl and firefly have an imaginary conversation about their different experiences of firefly being caught by girl and then released.

                                Encounter

     Girl                                       Firefly

                                                                                                   

Quick leap,

turned wrist.

Bright dot

in my fist.

                                                  Night wide—

                                                  sharp snap!

                                                  I flicker

                                                  in a trap.

Gliding spark,

quiet flash:

go forth,

go fast.

                                                  Sudden window

                                                  opens high;

                                                  warm wind

                                                  whispers “fly.”

                    --by Mary Quattlebaum, Cricket magazine

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Personification: Making a Poem Breathe

by Laura Krauss Melmed

A few months ago, I had the good fortune to attend an amazing production of the play, Warhorse, on Broadway.  The horses, main characters in the story, were portrayed by life-size puppets, each made of a wire armature with three people, clearly visible, operating it.  The way the puppeteers moved the horses, including making them breathe, brought them absolutely, convincingly to life.  In poetry, the device of personification performs a similar function by breathing life into inanimate objects or forces of nature through the use of words, usually including evocative verbs.

A lesson on personification should begin with reading some poems that utilize this device.  In the following poem excerpts, three poets have used personification to describe “night,” each in a fresh, original way.

from Taking Turns

by Norma Farber

When sun goes home

Behind the trees

and locks her shutters tight –

Read the lines and ask the students questions such as the following: What occurrence is Norma Farber writing about?  What images did her words created in the mind’s eye?  How does she manage to describe something that happens every day all over the world in such a unique and vivid way?  Which specific words or phrases give the excerpt its strong imagery?  The poem is called "Taking Turns"  because once the sun has gone home, other things begin to show up in the sky. Can you guess what they are?  What do you think Norma Farber has to say about them

The next two poem excerpts can be similarly read and discussed, and all three compared:

from Night Creature

by Lillian Moore

I like 

the quiet breathing

of the night,

The tree talk

the wind-swish

the star light.

from The Night

by Myra Cohen Livingston

The night

creeps in

around my head

and snuggles down

upon the bed . . .

Once the students have caught on to the concept, let them have a try at writing their own poems utilizing personification.  First write three headings on the board or on three pieces of chart paper:  Action Words, Places and Nouns.  For Action Words prompt the students to come up with a large variety of verbs by asking them what actions different parts of the body can do, what actions various animals might perform, what sounds different animals make, etc.)  For Places, have students throw out a bunch of settings, such as city, forest, beach, meadow, swamp, mountain. For Nouns, elicit various inanimate objects and phenomena that might be found in those places.  Now have the students chose a season and a place for the title of their poem.  They can then choose from the nouns and verbs to write a four line poem, as in the following example (although in the quoted examples the poets used rhyme, you should not require this of your students).  Here is an example I wrote:

Summer in the City

The sun glares angrily

At the sweating sidewalks,

As they lie there dreaming

Of a day at the beach.      

Your students will have fun making their poems breathe!

P.S. You can find the poems from which these excerpts were taken in Talking Like the Rain, A First Book of Poems, selected by X.J. Kennedy and Dorothy M. Kennedy, Little, Brown, 1992 ("Taking Turns" and "The Night"), and Sing a Song of Popcorn, Every Child's Book of Poems, selected by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, Eva Moore, Mary Michaels White, and Jan Carr, Scholastic, 1988 ("Night Creature").

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