Poetry Anthologies, Writing, Thinking, and Seeing More
If… Then… Curriculum by Lucy Calkins and Colleagues, pages 57 - 68
Recommend Texts:
This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort by Georgia Heard
Extra Innings: Baseball Poems by Lee Bennett Hopkins
If You’re Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand: Poems about School by Kalli Dakos
Fine Feathered Friends by Jane Yolen
Roots and Blues: A Celebration by Arnold Adoff
www.poetryfoundation.org
http://readingandwritingproject.com/public/themes/rwproject/resources/booklists/archived/readin
g/Poetry_Booklist.pdf
Bend 1: Create a Class Anthology
Writers brainstorm possible topics or themes for a class anthology. The teacher can read aloud
This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness by Joyce Sidman which is a fictional
story about a class that creates their own anthology.
Writers quickly draft poems to get at embedded themes from a topic. For example if the topic is
baseball, themes may include: practice makes perfect, sometimes no matter how hard you try,
you still don’t win, or it’s hard to let your team down. Some students may choose overlapping
themes to write about. The point of this work is to give students practice using poetry to get
across meaning and that they write, write, write.
Writers zoom in on small moments and vivid images that are tied to the meaning you hope to
convey. For this and other teaching points, the teacher will want to model strategies and write in
from of students, letting them inside the process of writing.
Writers use line breaks to show shifts in time or setting, for dramatic effect, or to influence the
way a reader reads the poem.
Writers use all they know about narrative writing when they write poetry. They use dialogue,
internal thinking, descriptive details, and other craft moves to bring out what a poem is really
about. The qualities of good writing span genres.
Writers delve into mentor texts and poetry anthologies to get ideas about craft and structure. The
teacher may display poems around the room, have a poem of the day, and fill the class library
with poetry. Also teachers may want to refer to mentor poems during the mid-workshop TP.
Writers know that poems about the same topic can be different or get at various sides of the
topic. The teacher may want to compare “Dreams” by Langston Hughes and “Listen to the
Mustn’ts” by Shel Silverstein. Hughes’s poem is dark and suggests that without our imagination,
we are lost. Silverstein is more hopeful, letting the reader know that dreaming is always
possible, even when others are naysayers.
Writers consider who the speaker might be and what we can tell about the speaker from the ideas
that come through in the poem. Teach students that the poet and the speaker may or may not be
the same person: that poets can take on the voice or “persona” of someone else. Students can try
this in their own writing. (This TP may be a continuation of the previous one.)
Bend 2: Generate Ideas for Anthologies and Collect Poems
Writers come up with topics for their individual anthologies and write poems exploring different
perspectives on those topics. This theme choice should feel deliberate and intentional and be one
about which the children have some strong feelings and investment.
Writers grow poems out of observations, emotions, memories, images, or a clever turn of phrase
that is borrowed, overheard, or invented out of the blue. Teachers may want to introduce 3 or 4
strategies, so as not to inundate students with too many strategies at once. Possible strategies are
indented below. Students begin collecting ideas and/or poems in their writing notebooks. Often
journal entries may not start out looking like poems, instead taking the shape of small
paragraphs, perhaps like story blurbs. This is to be expected, but what is important is that
children learn to generate ideas that have power and meaning.
Writers read poetry with a partner (first aloud, then silently) and discuss it. These
conversations often lead to fast and furious writing of original poems. Teachers will want
to model how a mentor poem can lead to a poem about the same topic, a poem that follows
the same structure, or a poem that talks back to the original poem.
Writers know that poems don’t have to look or sound a certain way. Teachers can choose
to read a selection of poems from a couple anthologies that showcase different effects a
group of poems can have. For example, a Jack Prelutsky book may include poems loosely
connected by humor, whereas Lee Bennett Hopkins’s baseball collection as a more explicit
topical connection with more diversity of emotion and style.
Writers comb through old journal entries to evoke inspiration. Teachers will urge students
to pry old entries apart with a pencil, to circle or copy out a line or a paragraph they might
turn into a poem. Writers often return to the same themes over and over.
Writers look at images or going on observation walks with a notebook and pen in hand to
gather seed ideas. Teach students to first write long about what they see, what they notice,
and what this makes them think. It is essential for teachers to model a thoughtfulness and a
wakefulness to get a poem going.
Writers notice how songs are actually poems. They include line breaks, repetition,
figurative language, and rhyme schemes which may inspire the students to write more
poems. Also 2 songs may be on the same topic, but have very different angles (e.g., “Love
Hurts” and “All You Need Is Love”). A catchy phrase or lyrical line may inspire a bigger
idea.
Writers don’t wait to revise their writing; even a first try is open to rethinking and reworking.
Teachers will want to model how a first try can spawn new thinking that leads to the writing of a
whole new poem, not just changing a word here and there. Also, teachers will continue to
encourage students to write a lot which often means writing lots of versions of poems rather than
long poems. Below is an example where Lucy added an image about the setting to make the
poem more piercing.
Original
He was so mad
he threw a shoe
into the basement wall.
I was scared of his anger
as usual.
Revised
He was so mad
he threw a shoe
into the basement wall.
The shoe thumped to the ground,
leaving a hole, ragged and dark
between my brother and me.
I was scared of his anger
as usual.
Writers review poems as the unit progresses and decided that they need to go back and collect
more entries, so they can write more poems. Often anthologies start to shirt, and they’ll need
new poems to fill out their ideas.
Bend 3 Get Strong Drafts Going and Revise All Along
Writers talk with their peers to write more reflectively about the entries they have collected. To
help students uncover deeper meaning, teachers may want to create an anchor chart of the
following talk stems.
“I’m writing about this because…”
“I want my reader to feel or think…”
“One thing that may be missing here is…”
Writers began to draft their ideas more formally and experiment with the craft of poets. At first,
teachers often emphasize free verse, but rhyming can be taught as well.
Writers turn prose into poetry. They do this by discovering rhythm in sentences. For example:
Prose
I was running in the park with my friends, and we were all running
together at first, But because I had allergies, I had trouble keeping up with
them. Soon I was all by myself, watching my friends run farther away
from me. I felt so weak and alone.
Poetry
I was running in the park / with my friends, / and we were all running
together at first. / But because I had allergies, / I had trouble keeping up with
them.
Writers decided where line breaks should go. They know from other poems that sometimes they
go where there are end marks, sometimes they go after important words, and sometimes poets
use line breaks just where they think it sounds good to pause.
Writers experiment with making lines and stanzas that quickly create the visual look of a poem.
Writers may decide to cut lines or cut and paste lines into a different order. This can change the
tone of a poem. For example:
original
eliminate words
add syllables to make
breathless & fast paced
shorter breaks make
poem quieter
I was running in the park / with my friends / and we were
all running together at first.
We were all running together / at first
In the park we were all running together at first
My breathing got harder and
I started to fall
behind.
Soon
I was
alone.
Writers use meter (the number of beats/syllables in a given line, plus the pattern of those
syllables) to affect their poetry.
Writers convey their ideas visually, deciding how long or short to make their lines on the page,
whether there are stanzas and how many, which words are capitalized, and what kinds of
punctuation to use. The white space around words is used by writers to pause, take a breath, and
make something stand out from all the other words.
Writers know a variety of techniques to revise poetry.
 They could try starting right in the moment instead of summarizing everything about
their subject.
 They could try being more precise about their choice of words.
 They could add imagery (similes) to convey meaning.
 They can express their thoughts and feelings by the way they make a line sound.
 They choose when to use rhyme and which words to rhyme.
 They choose to leave the reader a gift at the end by adding a special image.
Writing partners work to energize each other. They give each other feedback and recommend
next steps. Partners also notice where there are holes in the anthology.
Writers play with punctuation. For example, if you want the mood to be sad, use less
exclamation points. Also, writers use commas to break apart a list or to add more detailsupplying words to their lines.
Writers may use standard forms of poetry such as a haiku or pantoum.
Bend 4 Edit Poems and Assemble Anthologies for Publication
Writers make purposeful choices about grammar, spelling, and punctuation and stick to those
rules when they write poetry. For example, a poet may decide to go to a new line at the end of
every idea instead of using a period. Then, when she edits she will check that she always does
this.
Writers decide which poems to include in their anthologies. They may choose the ones they like
best, or base choices around subjects.
Writers may include mentor poems and even excerpts of texts to complement the them of their
anthology.
Writers make choices about the order of poems. They may look at mentor anthologies to see
how poems are organized.
Writers celebrate. Anthologies and/or poems can be shared in many ways. They may hang
around the room or school with illustrations or be performed.