This week is Teacher Appreciation Week, and the cover story in a recent edition of Time for Kids magazine were small vignettes written by famous people about their favorite teachers, and the impact those educators have had on their lives. I saw an opportunity to teach my sixth graders about Found Poems (and hope to do Blackout Poems some other day), of remixing words and phrases from a text to create a poem from inside the passages.
I created an appreciation poem myself as a mentor text, writing a poem about my sixth grade teacher — Mr. Dudak — who inspired me in many ways, and is one of the few teachers I still remember from elementary school. I even wrote about Mr. Dudak many years ago in The Boston Globe (but I’ll be darned if I can find a copy online … still looking, and I don’t even know where he is anymore to find him, but will keep trying.)
My students enjoyed the poem I wrote. I did, too.
Aside from making mustaches and other cosmetic choices on the magazine images with the Sharpies I gave them as I read the vignettes out loud, they dove in to find interesting phrases and words as they began to make a gift of a poem to a favorite teacher in our building as a token of appreciation.
They will be doing final versions of the poems today, and then decorating envelopes tomorrow, and I hope the found words help them express their feelings about former teachers. The few student poems that I saw being worked on yesterday were pretty powerful. I hope they send a message of appreciation from sixth graders, about to leave our elementary school, to their recipients, my colleagues in the building.
Peace (find it),
Kevin