I believe most lesson plans can be tweaked to fit writers at all levels. This idea came to me a decade ago while getting an MFA in Creative Writing.

During a workshop, Honor Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter, gave us a writing prompt and quickly added: “Don’t forget to use descriptive detail. Appeal to all five senses.” 

I found her words humbling, because hours earlier I’d conveyed them to twelfth graders. Yet the message can’t be repeated often enough as many writers, young and not so young, often share only what they see, omitting the other senses.

Fast forward to today, and I just finished teaching the use of sensory details to second- through fifth-graders whose skills vary depending on their age and placement in general education or a gifted and talented program.

The challenge: How to adapt one lesson plan to fit many needs?

With younger students (say first- through third-graders), I suggest spending a lot of time brainstorming, followed by creating a group description of their classroom.

As inspiration, I offer passages from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings.

I then ask students to write a description of a place they know well.

“Your goal is to be specific,” I explain. “Don’t just say the cafeteria is noisy. Who makes the racket? What exactly do you hear?”

Here’s a second-grader describing Jamaica:

“I hear the birds chirping nice and loud and sometimes the rustling between coconut trees. Also, I hear the nice orange rooster crowing in the early morning when the sun starts to come out.”

Younger students may need a second session to polish their portraits of a place. It’s an opportunity to encourage them to include details they left out.

With older students (fourth grade and above), I go deeper, using their descriptions as a jumping off point. Writers compose descriptions of places for a reason—to create a setting that will frame, if not drive, a story. Isn’t theHogwartsSchoolin the Harry Potter series the perfect setting for learning wizardry? 

During this second session, I ask students to use their descriptions as the setting of a story, whether true or make believe. 

I use an excerpt from James Baldwin’s short story “The Rockpile” to show how a hill of rocks evolved into a story about a boy forbidden to play there.

Here’s a fifth-grader describing her tomato garden: “I can hear the bugs eating a spoiled tomato as they buzz by racing to it. Starvation in their eyes.  Thanks to some magic water, one stalk grew sky high.”

A fourth-grader transports readers to a basketball court: “You can hear sneakers squeaking from running on a silk floor. You also hear basketballs dribbling up and down the court….One day, a boy shot a ball and it grew arms….”

I encourage students to take a closer look at their world, sharing its sparkle and bumps, rhythm and scents, and whatever they feel.

-Linda Morel

Linda Morel is a nonfiction writer and T&W teaching artist.  You can read more about Linda here.

For a two-part lesson plan that guides students through sensory description of place, go here; for how to utilize the descriptions to develop a story setting, go here. 

For a sample of student writing that came out of this exercise, go here.  Continue to check out our tumblr page at teachersandwriters.tumblr.com for more student writing from Linda's residency, as well as other student writing from other T&W writers' residencies, too!

There are few things more comforting than committing a poem to memory. To know that if everything around you suddenly crumbled, you would have—safely tucked in the deepest part of your heart—Ruth Stone’s “Mantra” or Robert Frost’s “Snowy Evening” is to understand that, eventually, everything will be okay. Because of this, I begin every poetry workshop I teach by having students memorize Langston Hughes’s “Dreams”:

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

This tiny two-stanza poem replete with poor bird and cold, barren field has proven to be accessible to people of all ages and abilities. Years ago when I was working with children with autism who were mostly nonverbal, I found that, with the use of simple hand gestures and repeated motions, the children were able to “memorize” the poem themselves. Their sense of accomplishment in “performing” the poem for others never failed to delight me or their classroom teachers.

The hand gestures are straightforward: a quick clasping of the hands for “hold fast,” followed by a waving of the fingers at the temples for “dreams.” You can surely imagine what “die” looks like (and how funny it can be to enact), as well as, that limp arm of the “broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” “Life” is the most exciting: a shooting-up of the arm into the sky, and a pronouncement of “Life,” often followed by my request to “Say it like you mean it,” which leads to an even faster extension of the arm and an even louder saying of “Life!!!”

Just this past Tuesday, I taught this poem to a group of three-year-olds at my daughter’s preschool.  I was amazed not only by how quickly they were able to take it in but also by how much they grasped it on a conceptual level. “Life without dreams,” I explained to them, “is like a bird that can’t fly. It would be like…like what?” I urged them. “A ballerina,” Zoe said, and then she frowned a little as she went on: “A ballerina that can’t dance.” And yet, I told them, all we have to do—so we can dance and dance and dance!—is hold fast to our dreams.

Last winter, walking down the street in Brooklyn late one evening I ran into a classroom teacher that I hadn’t seen in years. “I still know the poem!” she said. “The poem?” I asked. “Dreams!” she said. “I still know it by heart. I say it to myself over and over on the subway sometimes!”

Imagine if that’s what everyone on the subway was doing—not going over the endless to-do list or mentally drafting out yet another e-mail or staring blankly at the rows and rows of advertisements, but instead, reciting poems that they’ve carried around in their hearts for years—oh, what a different city it would be!

-Nicole Callihan

Nicole Callihan writes poems, stories, and essays, and has been a T&W teaching artist since 1998.  You can read more about Nicole here.

Welcome to the Teachers & Writers Collaborative blog, where you’ll find discussions, insights, and reflections from the T&W community.

Our blog will feature lesson plans for teaching the craft of writing to children and adults in schools and communities; student writers’ poetry and prose; sample articles from Teachers & Writers Magazine, a print quarterly that’s winner of 10 Educational Press Awards for Excellence; T&W news and events; writing prompts, Haiku interviews, and a compelling history of T&W’s early writers such as June Jordan, Kenneth Koch, Anne Sexton, Herbert Kohl, and many others.

And who knows what else? Like all good writing projects, our blog is a living experiment.

As part of the T&W community, we encourage you to read, comment, read, respond, write a few lines of poetry, start your next book project, learn some great teaching ideas and expand upon them as you see fit for your own writing practice, for your students, or your writing group. We look forward to hearing from you!

The Possum

Janet L. Bland

It started with a possum running right in front of the van. There are many things that I don’t want to happen when I am driving a van full of my students (including, but not limited to, vomiting, flat tires, love triangles, and snowstorms), but I really don’t want to run over a possum. My vanload of students had spent the afternoon wandering through and working in the galleries of the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University in Athens. After an introduction to the permanent collection by Jolene Powell (chair of our art department), their assignment was to select a piece of art from the permanent collection and write a poem employing vivid imagery, representing the visual with language. Once they had claimed a particular piece, they each sat down on the floor in front of their paintings or their sculptures and started working in that absorbing intensity of learning that we hope for more often than we get. Then, after our dinner at an Indian restaurant, we were heading for a quick stop at Starbucks before driving home. (more...)

Eliciting Playfulness and the Unexpected: Teaching the Poems of Kenneth Koch

Joanna Fuhrman

In addition to being a central member of the group of poets whose surreal, funny, and chatty poems came to be labeled “New York School,” Kenneth Koch (1925–2002) is well known as an innovator in teaching poetry writing to children. My pedagogy, like that of many poets who teach in elementary and high schools, has been deeply influenced by Koch’s writing about teaching poetry. In his books, Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Koch explains his method: Students will read a poem, and then use a structural element in the poem as a starting point for their own work. For example, after reading Williams Carlos Williams’ poem “This is Just to Say” (in which the speaker says he is sorry for eating the plums in the icebox, but then brags, “they were delicious/so sweet/ and so cold”), (more...)