Mondays can be hard, but I have a colleague who calls out an alliterative daily mantra to everyone she sees. “Magical Monday,” she calls as she passes my classroom before school started this morning. “Magical Monday,” I call back.
Mondays don’t always feel magical, but today felt different. I headed out for recess duty with the sun shining on my shoulders. As I walked out onto the playground one of my first grade students ran up with an envelope in her hand. “Mrs. Douillard,” she said, “I wrote a poem for you!”
In our class we study a poem every week, write poetry with some regularity, and delight in metaphorical thinking. Words matter. They help us express ourselves, understand our world, and communicate with others. I love it when students take our learning outside the classroom walls and write for their own purposes.
My student pulled her poem out of the envelope to show me. “Will you read it to me?” I asked. And she proceeded to read:
Sea Sound
A sea sound is a heart broken.
A sea sound is birth from your heart.
Sea sound is you hearing waves dancing.
This is my poem
When I asked what inspired her to write, she responded, “It was the waves dancing.” She told me I could keep the poem and off she went to play with her friends before the school bell rang.
That is a magical Monday for sure!
Thinking Through My Lens 
This is awesome, and brightened my Monday considerably! The line, “a sea sound is a heart broken,” brought tears to my eyes.
Poetry is a gift. What a lovely sound, a child reading a poem.
The best of all magical Mondays, indeed! What a gift! We’re writing poetry right now and I have lots of students telling me how much they’re writing at home and sharing some of that. It’s so wonderful. You do such a tremendous job keeping poetry front and center in your classroom all the time. Something I would like to aspire to!