For today’s poetry inspiration in our first grade classroom, I pulled out Georgia Heard and Rebecca Kai Dotlich’s Welcome to the Wonder House and we read a poem or two from each “room.” Students loved the rooms–and were already thinking about rooms that weren’t represented in the book. And then we all wrote. They were to choose a “room” that they felt connected to (I did say yes to those who wanted to combine rooms) and then pick the kind of poem they wanted to write. I noticed students writing short poems (we’ve written Hay(na)ku, Haiku, and 16 word poems in the last week or so), question poems, and poems of their own design. I had a student telling me she decided not to use any capital letters of punctuation like William Carlos Williams did in The Red Wheelbarrow. I can feel all the ways that poetry has seeped into their bones and their souls this year. It was a hectic day today with too many things pulling my at my attention, so I only really got a glimpse at what got written–we’ll get back to these pieces on Monday.

I decided to try a poem from the room of ordinary things–and wrote about dandelions. I guess it could also be located in the room of nature or maybe even the room of gardens. But I like that dandelions are everywhere–even where they are not wanted! I wrote several different kinds of poems, but decided on the Haiku to share today.

small yellow forest

blossoms on my front yard

explodes in wind blown seeds

@kd0602