Tag Archives: poets

If: NPM25 Day 29

Last week I came across a list of someone’s favorite children’s books of 2025 and was immediately drawn to If I Could Choose a Best Day. It’s a collection of poems that all begin with the word If, edited by Irene Latham and Charles Waters. I do love a great collection of poetry–especially a collection that includes living poets. I’m sure that no one is surprised that I needed to buy yet another poetry book to read to my students.

Before reading the book today, I had asked my students, as part of our morning message, what poem they might write if the poem began with the words If I… Their imaginations went right away to ideas like If I could fly… and If I met a unicorn…

After recess, it was time to read the book. (It had arrived on Saturday and I read through the poems over the weekend). Like Welcome to the Wonder House (that we read last week and I wrote about here), the book is organized into different categories of poems. They include: Everyday Magic, The Power of You, Kinfolk and Companions, and Anything is Possible. I read a variety of poems from each section. My students recognized poets we had read before and they noticed that all the poems began with the word If, but only a few began with If I. There were poems about pencils, poems about bikes, poems about birds, and poems about words. There were poems about friendship, poems about wishes, and poems about peace.

And then it was time for some writing. Under the influence of the possibilities offered by the word If, my students began to craft their own poems. I love when ideas pour rather than trickle. Ideas were flowing, but there was only enough time to hear a few students read an early draft. I’m hoping to have time to go back to these poems tomorrow.

So in the spirit of following the If… Here is my own early draft:

If the ocean were my bedroom

my dreams would be salty and big enough

to hold a blue whale

balancing the earth on a single puff of breath

before diving back into the depths of sleep

If the ocean were my bedroom

I would be lullabied by sea birds

and rocked to sleep by sea stars dancing on tiny tube feet

and wake

to the beauty of biodiversity

and possibility of interconnectedness

lessons learned in watery dreams

waiting to be lived

today

@kd0602

You’ll notice that I have not included a title for my poem. Stefani over at Verselove has reminded us today that titles matter and influence our reading of poems. Any suggestions for this one of mine?

Nature’s Medicine: NPM24 Day 14

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A Golden Shovel? It’s a poetry form I’ve heard about, but have never tried until today. Margaret at #verselove today suggested picking a line from a Billy Collins poem as inspiration for a golden shovel or any other kind of poem. But I couldn’t get Ada Limon’s new book, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World out of my head. You can get a peek reading this article: Pick Your Poem: 6 Poems to Transport You into the Natural World. So I decided to pick a line from one of the 6 that has been speaking to me–it’s called Twenty Minutes in the Backyard by Alberto Rios.

After reading the poem a few times, I decided to use this line: While the whole world simply moves forward.

Nature’s Medicine

Backyarding with the crows and bees while

framing photos in my mind’s eye seeking the

sunlight’s warmth, trying to remain whole

as time stretches and contracts, I’m spinning in space atop the world

in this outdoor space, I stop the spinning to smell lavender blossoms, feel the ridged aloe simply

spreading, spreading, filling space along the path as it moves

greening and growing wholing my mind, calming frantic synapses, inching me forward

Thinking about Poetry

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Over at The Nerdy Book Club, Cindy has invited readers to share their favorite poets or poems.

I love poetry…especially in the classroom. Each week in our classroom we study a poem, noticing what the poet is doing and paying attention to the images it creates in our minds. We read it aloud and notice how the words feel in our mouths. Individual students read and together we read chorally.

Later in the week, we revisit our poem and create an illustration that captures our understanding of the poem. We glue our poem and illustration into a composition book we call our poetry anthology. By the end of the school year, students have read, studied, and illustrated more than 30 poems…over the course of the three years they spend in our multiage classroom, they have close to 100 poems collected and illustrated to take home and treasure.

One of my favorite poets to share with my young students is Valerie Worth. I love her short poems. They are accessible to children. And I love that she writes about ordinary things. But these are not simple poems…they are full of imagery, word play, and figurative language.

One of my favorites is Safety Pin.

safety pin

Valerie Worth

Closed, it sleeps On its side Quietly,
The silver Image

Of some Small fish;

Opened, it snaps Its tail out
Like a thin Shrimp,

and looks
At the sharp Point with a Surprised eye.