I love short form poetry, especially when working with young children. Today we read 16 Words: William Carlos Williams and “The Red Wheelbarrow” by Lisa Rogers and learned about a poem made up of a mere 16 words. When my first grade students studied the text of the poem, they immediately noticed that there were four stanzas (awareness built of studying a poem each week). They also noticed that each stanza contained four words (how had I missed that detail?). They noticed the lack of capitalization and punctuation (“he broke the rules!”), something we have noticed with other poets and other poems.

Of course, we had to try our own 16-word poetry. And in a mere five minutes, students expressed their ideas following Williams’ text as their mentor. Here’s a few examples from 6 and 7 year old poets:

Horses

outside the stable

inside

a field of grass

waits in the sun

for horses to run

by A

A Bee Poem

buzzing in the

breeze

is a little

bee

sipping nectar from

flowers

to make yummy

honey

by G

Feelings

white blue and

red

sad and mad

happy

calm purple and

green

pink exciting brown

down

by C

And one by a student who is my unexpected poet–if I say the word poem, his entire body lights up…and he can’t wait to hear the poems and write his own!

The Yellow Bee

i sing with trees

i flew with clouds

i feel the breeze

i saw the earth

by R

And mine, composed while writing with my class, inspired by looking out the window of my classroom.

Yellow Sunflowers

outside the classroom

door

yellow sunflowers sway

dancing

in the sea

breeze

children writing poems

inside