I felt like a bird, blender, hurricane.
Flying like a bird.
Twirling like a rock in a blender.
Flopping like an ear of a floppy-eared dog.
That is freakin' poetry. That is what my kid produced in the creative writing workshop that I'm teaching. On Mondays it's with teenagers -- and I love it. On Wednesdays it's with younger kids, and both of my spawn participate. I wasn't expecting to love it as much, but I did. I did. The children were all supportive of each other and willing to share and they were sweet and funny and crazy-enthusiastic to learn.
For the future workshops they will be bringing their work that they will do during the week, but as today was the first day we did an introductory exercise/mini-lesson. After we reviewed what adjectives and adverbs are (and in so doing reviewed what nouns and verbs are) they went into the hallway with the instruction to spin, or jump, or dance, or whatever... And then they came back to their paper and pens and wrote the words that came to them. Then quick like little bunnies they just scrabble-scribbled those words into phrases. I told them that their "poems" weren't going to be brilliant because we were just doing it as an exercise to provide material for a practice workshop, but guess what? I was wrong. They were brilliant.
