“Close your eyes, and just listen to my voice. There is a door in front of you. Open it. What do you see when you walk through to the other side?”
Today we began by visualizing spaces through a mindfulness exercise. We realized that by closing our eyes, we were able to see more details in our scenes.
Those details became the basis for the poems that we would write later. We were introduced to poetry’s stanzas and line breaks and all of the ways that poets emphasize words and emotions.
After examining poems, we took our scenery prose and formed poignant, funny, and beautiful poems, but we took the lesson even further.
We learned how the dash and the parenthesis are used to add emphasis and to downplay or whisper information (the latter is the role of the parenthesis). Ms. Joy literally kicked her way around the room as each dash was read to help campers visualize the true meaning of the dash — to spotlight important information.
What an inspirational way to end our first week!
Lesson Learned: “Punctuation in poetry is important to communicate with your reader.”
Quote of the Day: “I feel so deep! I want to be a poet now!”