Poetry is our current unit of study in the seventh grade. We have been reading a novel called “Love That Dog” by Sharon Creech. The novel is written in the style of a journal and the narrator is a boy named Jack. Jack writes about the poems he has been reading in class with his teacher and how he feels about them while creating his own poems.

After reading Jack’s responses and his poems, the students also read and write poems. Some of the poems we read in this unit of study are “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Pasture” by Robert Frost, “The Tyger” by Robert Blake, “Street Music” by Arnold Adoff, and “Love That Boy” by Walter Dean Meyers.

Please ask your students about their favorite poems and what writing strategies they are using in their own poetry. Question them about their rhyming patterns, metaphors, similes, imagery, alliteration, and their use of personification and stanza. Feel free to offer suggestions on their choice of words and topics.

Stay tuned for the final project. It is my hope to be able to share some of the student’s work with you in the end using either a podcast or wikispace linked to this site.