This is December, as much or more than decorations and presents. This, plus oak leaves scuttling across a crust of snow, the dark silhouettes of winter trees, and heavy purple clouds hinting at the possibility of more snow later.
Linda has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at A Word Edgewise.
Interested in hosting a Poetry Friday roundup in January – June 2026? There are still spaces available! The signup is here.
(Junco photo via Unsplash.)
The Inklings challenge for this month came from Heidi, who encouraged us to write a poem of address to an article of clothing. After auditioning several ideas, I settled on my old friend Barn Coat. We’ve been through many winters together, and I know we’ve got many more yet to go.
Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met this month’s challenge:
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Linda @A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Irene has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Live Your Poem.
Interested in hosting a Poetry Friday roundup in January – June 2026? The signup is here.
It’s that time again. Six-ish months have passed since last we queued up to host the Poetry Friday roundups.
What is the Poetry Friday roundup? A gathering of links to posts featuring original or shared poems, or reviews of poetry books. A carnival of poetry posts. Here is an explanation that Rene LaTulippe shared on her blog, No Water River, and here is an article Susan Thomsen wrote for the Poetry Foundation.
Who can do the Poetry Friday roundup? Anyone who is willing to gather the links in some way, shape, or form (Mr. Linky, “old school” in the comments, or ???) on the Friday of your choice. If you are new to the Poetry Friday community, jump right in, but perhaps choose a date later on so that we can spend some time getting to know each other.
How do you do a Poetry Friday roundup? If you’re not sure, stick around for a couple of weeks and watch…and learn! One thing we’re finding out is that folks who schedule their posts, or who live in a different time zone than you, appreciate it when the roundup post goes live sometime on Thursday.
How do I get the code for the PF Roundup Schedule for the sidebar of my blog? You can grab the list from the sidebar here at A(nother) Year of Reading, or I’d be happy to send it to you if you leave me your email address.
Why would I do a Poetry Friday Roundup? Community, community, community. It’s like hosting a poetry party on your blog!
Put your request in the comments (blog URL is appreciated) and I’ll update the calendar frequently. Feel free to share this post on all the various socials. And if WordPress is not playing nice, feel free to email me: marylee.hahn at gmail dot com.
And now for the where and when:
January
2 Catherine at Reading to the Core
9 Ruth at There is no such thing as a God-forsaken town
16 Jan at Bookseedstudio
23 Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference
30 Amy at The Poem Farm
February
6 Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone
13 Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge
20 Susan at Chicken Spaghetti
27 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
March
6 Karen at Karen Edmisten*
13 Linda at TeacherDance
20 Tanita at {fiction, instead of lies}
27 Marcie at Marcie Flinchum Atkins
April
3 Matt at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme
10 Jone at Jone Rush MacCulloch
17 Heidi at my juicy little universe
24 Irene at Live Your Poem
May
1 Patricia at Reverie
8 Cathy at Cathy Stenquist
15 Rose at Imagine the Possibilities
22 Carol at The Apples in My Orchard
29 Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading
June
5 Mona at Mona Voelkel
12 Linda at A Word Edgewise
19 Buffy at Buffy Silverman
26 Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect
OVERHEARD AT NCTE
Begin with gratitude.1
Center joy.2
Place is where stories start.3
You write yourself into existence.4
If you don’t know where you are
you probably don’t know who you are.5
Black poetry is light in darkness
hope
soul food
legacy.6
There is no wrong way to be a writer.7
We can bend the characters–they won’t break.8
Creativity is combinatory.9
Learning should be a collective.10
In relationships and connections we find meaning.11
We learn from reading.12
Characters inspire us and make us brave.13
Reading is the most subversive thing we can do.14
Overhead and Remixed by Mary Lee Hahn, 2025
This post is my contribution to the Poetry Sisters’ challenge to write an “overheard” poem. For my overheard, I used my notes from NCTE, and in the image you can see my away-from-home-no-laptop process. It was fun to go back to the basics/old school. After I drafted in my notebook and did the cut-and-paste recombination, I began my post on my phone and a whole new learning curve emerged: how to format! Thank goodness I can at least bumble in html.
Edited to add a link to the roundup at Buffy’s blog. Only a couple of the Poetry Sisters managed a post this month, what with NCTE and Life and All. You can find them on the roundup. Edited also to add the sources for each of my quotes.
Happy Thanksgiving, all!
.
Today’s poetry challenge came from Susan Thomsen at Chicken Spaghetti. The inspiration and mentor text was Donika Kelly’s “Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things” . Susan’s response to her own challenge is here. This was so much fun! I can’t wait to see what others came up with!
Carol has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup is at The Apples in My Orchard.
I’ve always been interested in finding the best books for transitional readers—readers who have learned to read and who are becoming more sophisticated readers. They often are new to chapter books, so finding books that support them as readers is important as they build skills and agency as readers.
I discovered the Bear and Bird series by Jarvis this summer. I love so much about this series and one thing I especially like is that the humor in the books appeal to a wide age-range of readers (maybe 3rd graders who are just starting chapter books).
The first Bear and Bird book I read with a child was “The Stick and Other Stories”. We both laughed aloud on the first page and we were both hooked. The first page made us laugh out loud and fall in love with one of the main characters at the same time.
Since that first book, I’ve enjoyed all of the Bear and Bird books and they have become one of my favorite new series for transitional readers. (I think there are 6 total books in the series now.) The latest book in the series is Bear and Bird: The Secret and Other Stories.
I love so much about this series. Most of all, while reading these books, I have the same feeling I had when I read Frog and Toad and Henry and Mudge books. Great stories about two friends -stories filled with humor and lessons in friendship.
These books are part of Candlewick’s “Sparks for New Readers” collection and as I have read these with children, I see the way that these books support transitional readers.
This is a great series for readers who are new to chapter books and who like great characters and a little humor! They make great read alouds for younger readers, too! Try one and if you love it, read the whole series!
Linda’s prompt for the Inkings challenge this month comes from Ethical ELA’s September Open Write by Kelsey Bigelow: “What is the happiest thing you’ve ever tasted?”
In brainstorming for the poem, I unearthed a memory of racing to the DQ to get a cone for Dad, and making it home before it melted. Being able to make him happy was sweeter than my own butterscotch dip cone.
Same thing with the good luck dumplings Nai Nai serves before I fly back to Ohio from San Diego. They are so SO yummy, but the best part is her happiness.
Three or four elections ago I brought some Nerds Gummy Clusters to snack on through the long day and to share with my fellow roster judges. This has become a tradition which we were delighted to share with a new member of our team on Tuesday. He had never had them. The look on his face was priceless.
Today I went for a long walk and brainstormed ideas for this poem. I drank in the delicious blue of the sky and savored the crispy crunch under my feet as I walked. Pure Fall happiness! (And that MOON last night!)
Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met this month’s challenge:
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Linda @A Word Edgewise
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Laura has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Laura Purdie Salas.
A child pyro with easy access to ashtrays. Smell of smoke ubiquitous. Mesmerized by flare and sulphurous flash. Burning matches held until fingers sting. Child pyro grows up in a world that burns, the sting now an ache, an ache of how and why that burns from the inside out while outside the smell of wet wood fire pit smoke pools in the low spot in the neighborhood and every breath brings an acrid blackness to lungs, even the trees forced to breathe the last gasp of their kin. Child pyro orphaned by lung cancers, never addicted, planting for possibility in a future free from fire.
A child mesmerized by
flare and flash
grows up
outside
in the neighborhood,
the trees their kin,
possibility a future fire.
a flare grows –
up in the trees
fire
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2025
What a doozy of a Poetry Sisters Challenge this month! The Poetry Foundation article about this form (invented by poet torrin a. greathouse) states:
A burning haibun must be composed of three (or more) parts—an initial prose poem, an erasure of that prose poem, and an erasure of the previous erasure down to a haiku. Additional segments of erasure may be integrated, but keep in mind the continuity of the piece.
The erasures are intended to be sequential and persistent. Once a piece of text has been blacked out, or burned away, it should not return. Furthermore, each erasure should represent some form of reorientation from the previous section, altering the meaning, tone, etcetera.
The focus of a burning haibun—in contrast to traditional haibun—should be on an interior landscape, by which I mean the landscape of memory. Though the form emerged from a meditation upon the contours of traumatic memory, you should by no means feel confined to writing within that space.
Somewhere within the poem’s text, something must burn.
What the Poetry Foundation doesn’t state is how tricky these are to write! Do you start with a mind-dump that becomes some kind of prose poem (whatever that is) that gets burned up as sequentially as the above quote would have you believe? Or do you start with a haiku and reverse-engineer the whole thing? Or do you write a paragraph, make it as weird as possible so as to seem like a prose poem, then pull a haiku out, go back and burn up the middle section, only to realize when you go to make the images for your post that you have broken the rules by using words you burned in the middle section for your haiku and have to start over again with the second two parts? (You might infer which of these processes was mine…)
I can’t wait to see what the other Poetry Sisters created!
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Jone has this week’s Halloween Poetry Friday roundup at Jone Rush MacCulloch.
The fire in my images is via Unsplash.
Read Aloud is one of the most important parts of the school day. For one, it is joyful-there is nothing like sharing a story as a community. Secondly, it is a time in the school day that supports growing readers in so many ways. For readers in Grades 2-5, read aloud can do so much to support growing readers in understanding the complexities in text.
When we wrote In Community With Readers: Transforming Reading Instruction with Read Alouds and Minilessons, we identified several skill that are important as children move from picture books that you can read in one sitting to chapter books. This list is in no way comprehensive, but it does help us think about the experiences children need with text as they become more independent with complex texts.
So, I am always reading with an eye toward read aloud, asking myself, “How can this book support readers, especially those who are new or semi-new to longer chapter books?” When I am reading with this lens, I know I want some features that may be new to readers, but I don’t want a read aloud that is so complex that I have to do the thinking for readers. I’m always looking for a book that can become a really good scaffold for growth and with many access points for the variety of readers in a classroom. This summer I found a book that I think is a perfect read aloud for grades 3 and 4—Growing Home by Beth Ferry, with art from The Fan Brothers.
I picked the book up because I love everything I’ve read by The Fan Brothers. But I had no idea what to expect. This book is the perfect illustrated chapter book and I found so many reasons it would make a great read aloud as I read. It has:
I like that the book is an accessible fantasy. So many middle grade readers love fantasy adn this one is anchored in realism so the setting (a home) is not one they have to imagine.
I like the dedication page for several reasons. Readers often skip these, but when we teach kids that the author often gives clues about the theme, etc. in the dedication, it adds some depth to the reading. These dedications will definitely give readers some angles to think about through the story.
I also love what the author does with foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is such a common literacy technique but often young readers miss the foreshadowing. Luckily, in this book, the author adds a bit to make the foreshadowing a bit accessible. She adds a sentence after the foreshadowing in case readers missed it. She writes, “We’re coming to that shortly. Just be patient.”
I think Growing Home is a book middle grade readers will LOVE and one that will help them grow as readers. The characters are fabulous, the theme is accessible and there is so much to talk about as you read. And for readers who don’t know this author or these illustrators, this book is a great introduction that might inspire them to read more of their work. Enjoy!
Do you subscribe to George Bilgere’s poem-a-day newsletter? I’m a big fan of Bilgere’s poetry. I even wrote a poem after hearing him speak in 2012. (Gads, that’s a long time ago now…and the link will probably tell you that Poetrepository is not a secure site. I won’t be offended if you don’t click through.)
Back to the newsletter. I’m a big fan of George Bilgere’s poetry, and, as it turns out, I quite like most every poem he chooses for his newsletter. His small musing that comes with each poem often makes me chuckle and sometimes makes me go back to the poem and read again.
Today, George wrote, “Sometimes you just feel like reading a Billy Collins poem, in the same way that sometimes it’s nice to take a walk in the woods on a glorious fall day.” And he was right. May we all live with our heart
“propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.“
.
Aimless Love
by Billy Collins
This morning as I walked along the lake shore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.
The rest of the poem is here.
Patricia has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Reverie.
A(nother) Year of Reading 