Poetry Friday: Try Cube

Cajun Prairie Grass by James Edmunds

Sow

Seed your world
lavishly,
like Cajun

prairie grass —
sending stars
everywhere.

So beauty
will expand,
sow beauty.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2022

I’ve only written a couple of tricubes. Until this one, I didn’t really like the form. Moral of the story: don’t give up too soon!

Thank you, Margaret, for “This Photo Wants to be a Poem,” from whence the image and inspiration came.

Buffy Silverman has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: A Trio for Folktale Week

This month, Linda (A Word Edgewise) challenged the Inklings to “Find or write a poem in any form of any length for Folktale Week November 14-20, 2022.” I came up with three that are worth sharing.

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All three poems came as surprises. The first is the most nonsensical poem of truth I’ve ever written. I think it might have its seeds in Kelly Barnhill’s new book for adults When Women Were Dragons, a book I HIGHLY recommend. The second, though the briefest, was the hardest to get just right (not surprising, actually). And the third? Well, after all the struggle I put into my dansa for last week, I surprised myself by writing another!

Here’s how the rest of the crew met Linda’s challenge:

Linda@A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly@Nix the Comfort Zone
Catherine@Reading to the Core
Margaret@Reflections on the Teche

Heidi has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at my juicy little universe. Link up and check out ALL the posts there!

Poetry Friday: We Did This

image by Yasser Mokhtarzadeh via Unsplash

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This month the Poetry Sisters wrote Dansas. This form features an opening quintrain (5 lines) is followed by quatrains (4 lines), with a quintrain rhyme scheme of AbbaA and the quatrain bbaA.

My first drafts were odes to Autumn. Somewhere along the line, my repeating line showed up and the rest just…flowed. Our planet just keeps doing what it’s tilted to do, and all of the changes we’ve made in its/our climate are irreversible. There’s no going back. A hard truth to swallow as we (hopefully, with votes galore) work to put on the brakes and do less damage moving forward.

Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters came up with this month:
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Kelly @ Kelly Ramsdell
Andi @ A Wrung Sponge

Jone has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup.

If you’re inclined to join us, next month we’re creating recipe poems! Your choice of form, length, meter, or topic, but each poem will be an assemblage of elements, using recipe text/cooking instructions to create …something. From a recipe for disaster, to your favorite aperitif, you have a month to craft your creation and serve it forth on November 25th.

Franki’s Weekly Text Set– Intentional Use of Dialogue: Picture Books with Talking Bubbles

Texts for this Text Set have been posted daily on Instagram. Follow @TextSets there to get daily updates!

This week’s books could make up a mini-unit on the intentional use of dialogue in narrative. So many young writers work hard to create dialogue in their writing and many are reading books in graphic novel form, that dialogue makes up a great deal of their writing.. For readers, it is important that they understand how dialogue impacts a story. For dialogue to work in a story, the author has to be intentional about its use. This week’s set of books will give young readers a way to look at dialogue with a writer’s eye–why did the author make this decision about dialogue. Hopefully after studying a small set of texts, writers can be more intentional and effective in their use of dialogue.

I think I’d get started with Lift and Dumplings for Lili. Lift is in graphic novel format with very few words. Much of the story is told through illustrations. But there is some dialogue that is important to the story. But the author is intentional about every word of dialogue. This book would make a good first book to notice and wonder about the decisions about when to include dialogue and when not to and how the dialogue adds to the story. In Dumplings from Lili, there are two kinds of dialogue–the dialogue in the text and the dialogue in talking bubbles as part of the illustrations. There are different reasons for each and thinking together about why some of the dialogue was embedded in the text while other dialogue was embedded in illustrations (what purpose does each serve to the story and reader) will make for good conversation.

In both Not Enough Lollipops and That’s My Sweater!, the dialogue is critical to the story. The story would make no sense without the dialogue. Sometimes dialogue adds some detail and sometimes the dialogue is used to tell the story. These are two books to think about how and when dialogue is used to tell the story. Dialogue is used in very different ways in these two books but much of the storyline depends on the dialogue in each.

In See the Cat and See the Dog, again dialogue is critical to the story. Without the dialogue the story would not make sense. However the dialogue is used in a bit of a different way in these two as the characters actually converse with the narrator. This is tricky to do well (and sometimes hard to understand as a reader) but it is something many children try in their writing. How did the author have the character talk back to the narrator effectively in these two books would be the question I’d ask with these.

In Our Day of the Dead Celebration, talking bubbles are used throughout the book. The dialogue is often part of the illustration so this is a great book to talk to readers about how important it is to read the text and the illustrations for full understanding. This dialogue adds detail to the main part of the story in very important ways. The way that the author used dialogue to tell more is intentional and effective and worthy of study.

So many of our students love to write with humor. It takes so much skill to do this and a favorite author to study humor writing is Josh Funk. In his fairy tale series (It’s Not Hansel and Gretel and It’s Not Jack and the Beanstalk pictured here) , the use of talking bubbles to add humor is intentional throughout the book. There is intentionality and craft to his decisions and for our writers who want to make their stories funny, studying the ways Josh Funk uses dialogue can help! (And these stories are just great fun to enjoy together!)

This week’s books were linked at Bookelicious and/or  Cover to Cover Children’s Bookstore. If you are looking for a fabulous local children’s bookstore to support, Cover to Cover is an amazing one. We are lucky to have them in Central Ohio! If you don’t have an independent children’s bookstore in your town, check out Bookelicious. They are an online independent bookstore for children with an incredible curated collection.

Franki’s Weekly Text Set-Great New Books With Rhyme

Texts for this Text Set have been posted daily on Instagram. Follow @TextSets there to get daily updates!

This week, we’ll look at some great new picture books with rhyme!

If you enjoyed Mary Had a Little Glam, you’ll be happy to know that Mary is back! This time Mary Hd a Little Plan! I love so much about both of these books. IN this new one, Mary works with her community to beatify a space in her neighborhood. I was so happy to have another book with this great character and the rhyme is great fun!

I love a good cumulative tale and Room for Everyone is a cumulative tale with rhyming text and amazing illustrations. What could be better for our young readers. This is a great read aloud for all ages. There is so much to see in each illustration.

Hip-Hop Lollipop is a book that makes you want to get up and move! The rhyme and rhythm of this book is pure joy as is the character, Lollipop! This is a bedtime book but would make a good read aloud anytime of day!

I put I Like This, You Like That and We Want a Dog together because each has simple text that tells a great story. The rhyming text in each comes in short phrases or sentences and the story is told across the text. I Like This, You Like That has a very accessible theme for young readers and the illustrations in We Want a Dog give readers lots to talk about.

Chester van Chime Who Forgot How to Rhyme is perfect for reading aloud to any preschool or primary classroom. In this story, poor Chester has forgotten how to rhyme. Even though readers should be able to jump in with the rhyming word he can’t come up with. This is a book kids will want to join in with rhyming words for Chester.

This week’s books were linked at Bookelicious and/or  Cover to Cover Children’s Bookstore. If you are looking for a fabulous local children’s bookstore to support, Cover to Cover is an amazing one. We are lucky to have them in Central Ohio! If you don’t have an independent children’s bookstore in your town, check out Bookelicious. They are an online independent bookstore for children with an incredible curated collection.

Poetry Friday: Wordy 30 Poems

Anybody out there addicted to Wordle or Waffle? I assume that more than a few of you who like to play around with words might have climbed aboard one or more of the current word game crazes! That’s why my challenge for the Inklings this month was to write a Wordy 30 Poem. A Wordy 30 is a poem using exactly 30 letters. Each line should have the same number of letters. Each line should use one word. You might have 6 lines with 5 letters in each line (like Wordle), or 5 x 6, 3 x 10, 10 x 3, 15 x 2, 2 x 15, 30 x 1, or (most unlikely) 1 x 30. Here are mine — a 5×6 and a 6×5.

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Here’s how the rest of the crew met my challenge:

Linda@A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly@Nix the Comfort Zone
Catherine@Reading to the Core
Margaret@Reflections on the Teche

Sarah Grace has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup.

And if you want to join in with the Poetry Sisters’ challenge this month, we’re writing Dansas, described here by Cousin Tanita: Its opening quintrain (5 lines) is followed by quatrains (4 lines), with a quintrain rhyme scheme of AbbaA and the quatrain bbaA. You’ll note that A repeats because the opening line of the first stanza is the final line of every stanza, including the first. 

Franki’s Weekly Text Set-Great Short Read Alouds for Grades 3-6

Texts for this Text Set have been posted daily on Instagram. Follow @TextSets there to get daily updates!

Read Aloud is one of the best times of any school day! And choosing the next read aloud is always so important. I love a great short read aloud, especially early in the school year. I want to build the Read Aloud routine with thinking and talk and I want engagement and access for every single child. I want there to be enough depth for lots of possibilities for talk. I know these first read alouds of the school year will teach me so much about students as readers. This week, I’ll share several of my favorite shorter length read alouds. Short but with depth and complexity for readers in grades 3-6. These writers know middle grade readers well!

I love every book by Pam Muñoz Ryan and I was excited to see this new one-Solimar: The Sword of the Monarchs . There is so much here that makes it a great book for read aloud. It is a fantasy and I think that it provides a great shared experience to understand how fantasy works. It also has a strong femail Latinx character who has lots of decisions to make so there is a lot to talk about there. An added bonus to reading this one aloud is that it might introduce readers to an incredible author whose books they will want to read independently once they know her!

Too Bright to See was a Finalist for the National Book Award AND a Newbery Honor book AND it won the Stonewall Award in 2021. Every sentence of this book is beautiful. This is the story of Bug, who is getting ready to start middle school. Bug is also grieving–Uncle Roderick recently passed away. Bug is working through so much–grief, friendship, gender identity, and a possible ghost in the house. There is so much love and acceptance packed into this short novel. This is a book I can read over and over because of the character, the story and the gorgeous writing. Lots for young readers to talk about and as always, Lukoff addresses issues of young readers brilliantly.

Harbor Me is an incredible book by Jacqueline Woodson. I’ve read this book aloud with fifth graders and the conversations were amazing. The characters and their relationships give readers so much to think about. The title (Harbor Me) and the dedication (For Lena and Alana, who harbor so many. And for my family, who harbors me.) both give middle grade readers a way to think about the meaning of the word harbor and why it is so important to this story. Often the title gives readers a clue into the theme of a book and by pondering Woodson’s meaning of the word harbor in this story and how it relates to these characters, readers can get depth of understanding.

I think it’s important to include fun reads during Read Aloud time. Maya and the Robot by Eve L. Ewing is fun but with plenty to think and talk about. Who doesn’t love a good robot story. There is so much in this story for children to connect to and Maya is a great character. The STEM thread is great as there isn’t a lot of middle grade fiction that explores STEM ideas. I also think the theme is accessible to this age so it makes for great conversation.

I am a big fan of sharing graphic novels as Read Alouds. Projecting the ebook version on the screen is a great way to experience a book as a community. I worry that so many of our students are reading graphic novels quickly without much support in reading them with depth and seeing all that is there. Reading aloud graphic novels can support a better understanding of how to navigate this format. Swim Team is one of my very favorite new middle grade graphic novels. There are great characters and the history of racism related to swimming is embedded in this story. For our readers who see graphic novels as a quick read, this book provides lots of opportunities to stop, think and talk to read with more depth. I hope this author has more books on the way!

I finished Katherine Applegate’s new book, Odder this week. What a gem of a book. The book is written in verse and follows the life a Odder, an otter who lives off the coast of California. I loved every word of this story (and the audio version is also fabulous!) The author’s note is a fabulous piece of this book as readers learn about the true stories behind this work of fiction. Odder is based on some of the otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Katherine Applegate invites readers to learn more. It’s a fascinating story and Odder is a character who will stay with me for a long time. So many of our middle grade readers are fans of The One and Only Ivan and it would be great conversation talking about the ways this author writes stories based on these incredible animals.

This week’s books were linked at Bookelicious and/or  Cover to Cover Children’s Bookstore. If you are looking for a fabulous local children’s bookstore to support, Cover to Cover is an amazing one. We are lucky to have them in Central Ohio! If you don’t have an independent children’s bookstore in your town, check out Bookelicious. They are an online independent bookstore for children with an incredible curated collection.