X Marks the Spot Poem
I worked with two Humanities teachers last week on writing poetry from prose, using a blog post I’d written last week. I remembered that Mo Daley, a friend from one of my writing groups, shared this technique after attending a conference where she learned more about how to engage students with writing.
To pull poetry from prose, students took their own stream of consciousness writing from the previous week and marked an X on it. They listed the words under the X marks and used those words to create a poem. To write X Marks the Spot poems, you can add other words and you don’t have to use them all – the idea is to create a word bank from the words you X. You can use any form of poetry for this – this is merely an idea technique.
My words:
abide daily we Jesus car granddaughter unison play they Silas of patient tempted packaged gathered can to died children how did story because for when boxes the Tennessee toys kitchen remind and of daughter challenging game was since Jesus and together
Belonging
we gathered in the kitchen
with the children
laughed in unison
at the stories
as we ate together
at a table that seated
everyone – past, present, and future
Common Threads 