HELLO MY NAME IS - Day 9

 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

April 1 - First Poem

April 2 - My Name

April 3 - Red

April 4 - Frank

April 5 - The Big Bad Wolf Had Been a Stray

April 6 - 8am on a Sunday

April 7 - Her Real Name is Orla Lola Bruin

April 8 - My Neighborhood

And now for today!

Students - Today's poem brings us back to Poem 1 in this series, "First Poem," in which Lou describes herself as (more a hiker, mushroom seeker). It felt like a good day for LRRH to go mushroom seeking (Hunting? Seeking? Which word to choose?) with her Nan, to write a poem showcasing this hobby these two share.

Today's is a free verse poem with no real rhyme or meter. The poem part relies on line breaks and white space. Because Lou and Nan are walking through deep forest, the line breaks moving along and indenting from left to write mirror their footsteps and their gathering. The white space creates pauses and slows down reading, quiets the poem down.

One thing you might choose to notice is that I name specific mushrooms: morels, lions mane, hen of the woods. When a person has a hobby, that persons know the specific words around that hobby, so of course Lou and Nan know and use actual specific mushroom names. When you reread your own writing, both poems and stories and nonfiction and opinion too, reread and revise to make any nouns more specific if you can. This will create more vivid and clear pictures in the minds of your readers.

Thank you for joining me on this ninth day of HELLO MY NAME IS...

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,

Amy

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