Using Your Poetic Voice!

LILIANA DELGADO, Student Life Editor|November 16, 2013

Students+in+Mrs.+Thornburg%27s+poetry+class+get+to+write%2C+illustrate+and+even+act+out+their+creative+inspirations.

Students in Mrs. Thornburg’s poetry class get to write, illustrate and even act out their creative inspirations.

 Poetry is many things to people; a way to express themselves, a hobby, and even a performing art. This year at Harvest Middle School, Mrs. Thornburg, an eighth grade math and AVID teacher, is offering a poetry class called “Voice Through Writing'” that’s a part of the exploratory wheel for seventh and eighth graders. Over the past few months her students have learned about poetry. During those weeks the students’ objective was to write at least ten poems (to get a ”B” in the class) and at the most twelve poems.

Students in this class can choose the topic of the poem as long as they write one poem a week. The students have two folders: the first folder is called the main folder which consists of random poems by other poets, and the second folder is called the construction folder which consists of poems by the students. Sometimes she picks certain topics as an outline so it’s not difficult to write poems.

When the students receive poems by random poets  sometimes they get in groups and act out the poem in front of class. In the first week of the poetry class, Mrs. Thornburg had the students act as poets by using their creativity and wrote quotes on large blank pieces of paper and hung them on the walls around the classroom.  “Writing poetry comes easy to me and I really enjoy writing it,” says 7th grader Alondra Rubio.