Hello!  This post is dedicated to my current class of students and all of their hard work so far this year.  They just completed their final exams for the first semester after taking similar tests in every class in every month for the last four months.  And I am the meanest teacher because right before these exams, I made them turn in a very important and time consuming project.

Here is one of my English classes with their poetry anthologies.  They should be so proud!

 And now for a sample of some of the best and funniest excerpts from these projects:

This student believes she will live to be 102 years old.  Ambition.

Pretty cool concrete poem about Taekwondo.

My students blow my mind every day.  The last two lines say, "She's not lost/ We just can't find her."

 

A rather dark student.  Bright, but very dark.

Concrete poem about tornados

So cute.  They had to write five haiku, one for each of the five senses, with accompanying illustrations and annotation.

Found poem.  They had to find an article and pick out words to write a poem.  They could only use words found in the original source.

This was a creepy surprise.  This kid found my facebook profile picture and included it in his anthology.  Of course, he added his own little detail - hot pink devil horns for Adam.

And the devil clearly stole his missing poem from his book.

I've been doing this poetry anthology project every year since I started teaching, and it has always been my favorite project to grade.  I love poetry, and I try my best to encourage my students to read and analyze poetry in order to become better poets.  This project that they created is a collection of the various poems they wrote over our five week unit.  They were required to revise, annotate, illustrate, and reflect on the process of writing poetry.  Some of them hated it, but most of them love it.  And they did a brilliant job (for the most part).  I'd say that's a win.

Love,
ali