Happy National Poetry Month!
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Hello, Poetry Friends! This month I am sharing poems written in the voice of Little Red Riding Hood, and I invite you to join me in writing in the voice of someone else too. You might choose a fairy tale character or a book character or a person from history or anyone else real or imagined. These are your poems, so you make the decisions. Each April day, I will share my poem and a little bit about writing poetry. Mostly, we’ll just be writing in short lines with good words and not worrying about rhyming. Meaning first. Our focus this month will be adopting the perspective of another…for 30 days. I invite you to join me in this project! To do so, simply:
1. Choose a character from fiction or history or somewhere else in the world of space and time, and commit to writing a daily poem in this person's voice for the 30 days of April 2025. You might even choose an animal.
2. Write a new poem for each day of April. Feel free to
print and find inspiration from this idea sheet that I will be writing from all month long.
Teachers, if you wish to share any HELLO MY NAME IS... subjects or poems, please email them to me at the contact button above. I would love to read what your students write and learn from how they approach their own projects.
LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD'S POEMS SO FAR
Students - Today's poem is about something I have wondered about many times - What do animals dream about? What was my pet's life before we knew each other? I even wrote a whole picture book about this idea, the idea of animal dreams. This book is called
DREAMING OF YOU. So, I suppose only makes sense that the Lou/LRRH in me would wonder this same thing, especially about Frank who did an evil deed. What was Frank-the-wolf's life before his calm dog life now?
Today's poem is from Lou's point of view, but I also wanted to make it a standalone poem. This means that while we know it's from LRRH's perspective because we know this month's theme here, another person could read this poem not knowing this and imagine it is from any dog owner's perspective. The poem can stand alone, without the other poems from this month.
Writing from wonder is always interesting. What are some of your life questions? You might choose to explore one in the world of a poem. As I did, you might even decide to include a direct questions in your poem, maybe even in the very last line as you see above. Ending a poem with a question gives readers something to think about.
Thank you for joining me on this twenty-fifth day of HELLO MY NAME IS...
Thank you very much to Heidi for hosting this week's Poetry Friday roundup over at my juicy little universe with a poem by a student and the Progressive Poem too. While you're at her place, don' tmiss the information she shares about her WHISPERshout writing workshops and poetry magazine written by young writers. Each Friday, all are invited to share poems, poem books, poetry ideas, and friendship in this open and welcoming poetry community.
Students - To learn about more National Poetry Month projects and all kinds of April goodness, visit Jama's Alphabet Soup where Jama has generously gathered this coming month's Kidlitosphere poetry happenings. And if you are interested in learning about or writing from any of my previous 14 National Poetry Month projects, you can find them here. Happy National Poetry Month!
xo,
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