What are you thankful for?
With Thanksgiving on the horizon, this question reverberates
through classrooms around the country. What better way to cultivate a spirit of
thankfulness than to have students read and write gratitude poems?
I was filled with gratitude myself when I discovered the book
THANKU: Poems of Gratitude, published by Millbrook Press, edited by
Miranda Paul, and illustrated by Marlena Myles. In this children’s poetry anthology, a diverse group of poets expresses
their feelings of thankfulness for things you’d expect, like family and friends,
and things unexpected, like scars and dimples. The poets also explore unique perspectives
on gratitude. For example, Naomi Shihab Nye takes on the perspective of Earth
and thanks the sky. Charles Waters thanks a waterfall for providing a rainbow. DianaMurray writes from the voice of an old sweatshirt filled with joy at the chance
to be worn again. In the days leading up
to Thanksgiving, try reading a poem a day from THANKU with your students. They’ll
delight in all the different ways to express gratitude.
Thankful
Writing
As a teacher, I was particularly thankful for the variety of
poetic forms provided in THANKU. From concrete to two-voice to tanka, each poem
showcases a different form or literary device. These forms and devices are
explained in the book’s back matter. The poems
provide wonderful mentor texts for students’ writing.
One poem from THANKU that I find especially conducive to
student imitation is a Liz Garton Scanlon’s “All This.” “All This” is composed in
the form of an Etheree. An Etheree is a
ten-line unrhymed poem. Line one is one syllable long. Line two is two
syllables. Each line continues to grow by one syllable until line ten is ten
syllables long. Liz Garton Scanlon graciously gave me permission to reprint her
poem here. Thank you, Liz!
Gratitude
in the Details
What I love about the Etheree form is that it provides a
structure for students to grow more detailed and specific as their poem
grows, just as Liz Garton Scanlon moves from the single word “snow” to “curled-up
cats”, to “the world’s dark and cold.”
To help students move from a general list of items for which
they are thankful to specific, tangible details, I’ve developed this GRATITUDE ETHEREE PLANNER. After brainstorming on the planner, students can use this ETHEREE TEMPLATE to compose their poems.
I hope writing Etheree poems leaves your students purring Thank
you, thank you, thank you too!
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About Michelle Schaub
Michelle Schaub is a language arts teacher and award-winning children's poet. She is the author of the picture book poetry collections Fresh-Picked Poetry: A Day at the Farmers’ Market, (which won the 2018 Growing Good Kids Award and 2019 Northern Lights Book Award,) and Finding Treasure: A Collection of Collections. She is also the author of two picture books in verse, the bedtime STEM book Dream Big, Little Scientists and Kindness is a Kite String: The Uplifting Power of Empathy. Her poems appear in several anthologies, including A World Full of Poems and Hop to It: Poems to Get You Moving. Michelle loves visiting schools and speaking at conferences on the power of poetry to boost literacy. Find out more at: https://www.michelleschaub.com/
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