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 - Writing the poems of the last two days, I knew that today's poem would be about delivering pie to the fairy tale forest neighbors. And today, I just wrote by watching, watching Nan and Lou pack their baskets and go. I did not think as much as usual about every single word, didn' t try to rhyme, didn't fuss with meter. This poem just wanted to live today, just as it is. Perhaps I will return to it later, move the words around, strengthen a verb, change a syllable count...perhaps not. But for today, everyone gets pie.
Thank you for joining me on this eighteenth day of HELLO MY NAME IS...
Thank you also to Jone for hosting this week's Poetry Friday roundup over at Jone Rush MacCulloch with an interview with Shirley Thacker. Each Friday, all are invited to share poems, poem books, poetry ideas, and friendship in this open and welcoming poetry community.
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!
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