Friday, January 18, 2013

1.  Retrieve your notebook from the crate.
2. Hand in your disclosure signatures and VIP form if you have them ready. 

3.  Complete these writing prompts 

a.  Pick a prompt from the list titled "Creative Writing Prompts About Me," and write at least a half-page response in your notebook.  Give it a title and today's date.

b.  Write a response to the picture projected on the screen.  You could write a description, a commentary, a poem, a brief story, or whatever you're moved to write based on that picture.  Your response should be about a half-page or so long.  Give it a title and today's date.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2390/2108633520_054e4d7eaf_o.jpg

4. Sharing -- clock appointments -- used 7 o'clock

5. Read to Write:  
a. Read:  Listen while Ms. Dorsey reads from Spilling Ink, "Section 2: Ugly First Drafts"
b. Write: 
I DARE YOU: Rewrite a scene from your life.  Think of something that happened today or yesterday, something that wasn't perfect -- maybe even something that was downright mortifying -- and rewrite it as you would have wanted it to happen.     [Spilling Ink by Anne Mazer and Ellen Potter, p. 11]

6.  Me-Bags  today:  In your composition book, take notes as your classmates present.  After each one, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. 

Morgan W.

Raelyn W.

Madelyn W.

Chandler T.

Kalie T.

Jessica S.

Emma R. 


7.  Read to Write:  Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life 
We read Jack Canfield's advise to Snoopy about dealing with rejection and difficulties from page 153 - 154.  

8.  My Writing Process -- Write this in your notebook. 
When you write, what works best for you?
 place, time, music or no music, people around or solitary, what materials (computer?  pen and paper?  a particular type of pen or pencil?  a particular journal or notebook or. . .?)  Do you need any props like snacks or . . . . ?

2012/2013 School Year -- Supplies

How Parents Can Help Students Improve Their Writing

The Trouble with Poetry

Here's a poem by U.S. Poet laureate, Billy Collins from  http://www.edutopia.org/trouble-poetry

The Trouble with Poetry: A Poem of Explanation

A U.S. poet laureate shares.

by Billy Collins

Billy Collins

Credit: Corbis Images

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night --
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky --

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.


And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,


and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.


But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

Billy Collins, the U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, is the author of seven collections of poetry and is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He serves as the poet laureate of New York State.

This article originally published on 10/18/2006

A Poem About Poetry

Ars Poetica

BY ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

A poem should be palpable and mute   

As a globed fruit,

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless   

As the flight of birds.

                         *               

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs.

                         *               

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean   

But be.

Three R's of Narrative Nonfiction

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/three-rs-of-narrative-nonfiction/?smid=tw-share

The Cat

Writer's Block?

Literary Consolation Prizes