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We've been busy writer bees this spring.

In February, T&W writer and teaching artist Melanie Maria Goodreaux led a professional development workshop (or "artist meeting") for T&W writers focused on how to keep special needs, general ed, and CTT classroom students engaged using good ole fashioned foil, tape, and endless play. We learned something more about what we already knew: that true learning happens when our pleasure pathways are opened and engaged.

In March, T&W writer Sarah Porter led an artist meeting on cross-curricular imaginative writing in the social studies and science classrooms. We did close reads of informational texts, grouped out to develop creative approaches to writing activities based on the texts, and talked about how teaching artists can collaborate with classroom teachers to hit that sweet spot where imaginative writing and the core subject curricula intersect.

Then in April, Phillip Lopate came to talk to our writers about the craft of essay writing and the challenges our teaching artists face in New York City classrooms when leading essay residencies, and to task our writers with writing themselves. Lopate, a prolific writer and editor who, in addition to having recently launched not one but two books (To Show and to Tell: the Craft of Literary Nonfiction and A Portrait Inside My Head), is also the director of the graduate nonfiction writing program at Columbia University. But perhaps even more important (to us), Lopate is one of T&W's early writers in the schools and an ardent supporter of T&W.

Also in April was our second "official" T&W Writers' Reading held in our Center for Imaginative Writing. An evening of CROSSING BOUNDARIES, T&W writers Joanna Fuhrman, Linda Morel, and J. Kathleen White read and presented multimedia to a bustin'-through-the-doors crowd.

Now it's May and we're ready for a cold one. We've got our eyes on the end-of-the-year party and reading set for May 23, where writers will share their own work at an open mic, and smile and laugh and pat each other on the backs and say, "Gee, you're great. Really just — wow, great." 

But before that happens! Don't miss an informal reading that will take place at T&W's Center for Imaginative Writing at 6:30 on May 9 where poets and translators and T&W experts and generally astounding humans, Mark Statman and Dave Johnson, will wow us all and we'll ooh and we'll aah and we'll clap and feel fuller and humbled and hopeful and so glad, so glad we love our T&W family so.

AND on May 18, please join PS 110/Florence Nightingale students, NYU Writers in the Public Schools Fellows, and Teachers & Writers Collaborative at our annual Barnes & Noble Bookfair & Poetry Reading from 11-12 on May 18 at the bustling Union Square location at 33 E 17th Street. (Can’t make our bookfair and reading on May 18? Just visit bn.com/bookfairs to support us online from 05/19/13 to 05/23/13 by entering Bookfair ID 110022308 at checkout. A percentage of your Barnes & Noble purchases will benefit T&W.) 

A billion thanks to our dedicated writers for the extraordinary leaps they make each day, and to the schools and classroom teachers and networks and foundations and corporations and PTAs and university partnerships that make their work possible.

Our writers' success is measured by the impact they make on children's lives. Kids' joy and surprise they experience when crafting a sentence or paragraph or line or phrase that a T&W writer facilitated is where the sugar's at. Period.

Spring has sprung. It's true it rains sometimes and the weather changes dramatically from hour to hour, but the sun is out, and it is shining bright. 

-Sarah Dohrmann, Education Director

...I do not write "about" things but "with" things or "out of" things. And I certainly do not map out a poem before I write it...I often learn after the fact of writing a poem what it may ultimately mean, and often even that notion of meaning shifts as the poem and I move through time (p.197-198).

-Peter Gizzi comments on his poem, "Human Memory Is Organic" in T&W book Structure & Surprise : Engaging Poetic Turns

Here is a simple idea for getting your classroom thinking and talking about poetry.  The objective is to develop a daily practice of using poetry in the classroom that will build student competence in reading comprehension and in drawing inferences from written material.

LESSON PLAN: Recipe for a Simple Start Poem of the Week by Georgia A. Popoff

Anticipated Time: One poem per week, five to ten minutes daily

Check out the T&W archives in our Digital Resource Center for this article and other great resources!

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by Wisotsky

5th grade

What if the statue of liberty were reinvented?

Would it hold a hot dog?

Would we be able to see it in the fog?

Would it be wearing a dress

Would it be fashionable to impress?

Would it look like a Woman?

Would it look like someone

hailing a yellow cab?

Would it still be holding a tab?

Or would it be listening to an ipod

would we even find that odd?

Would it be crowded by other statues

on the cross town bus

trying to ignore all of us?

Would it be taller than

the Brooklyn Bridge?

Would it have a bronze image?

Would it have a diamond crown

Could it see from downtown?

Would it speak Spanish, Russian,

Japanese and Portuguese?