A Poetry Workshop for First Graders (SELS) at their Donner Memorial State Park Camp-out

Summer moon over

mountains as white as the tip

of a fox’s tail 

 

- Basho

In my mind, SELS hit another home run with teaching how to be a human.

I headed out to the campground at Donner Memorial State Park last week to meet up with Justine Minczeski's First Grade. She'd reached out to me to teach a poetry workshop to support the work her students have done on endangered animals. Our focus for poems and writing was on the animals the students chose to study: wolverines, bighorn sheep, gray wolves, Sierra Nevada red fox, spotted owls and Lahontan Cutthroat trout.  

"Did you bring a poem you wrote," asked one small student from beneath her pink backpack loaded with jacket, journal, and lunch. She looked up at me with such openness to discovery. I hadn't realized I'd be meeting an insistent audience eager for poetry. I opened on my phone a series of haiku I've written and read her one about a bat. 

"Can I see?" asked two more. A third wandered over to the side and peered into my phone screen. Delightfully, all four children began reading together out loud the poem to the bat, chanting the haiku like a spell or a birthday song:

Hello bat, wings of skin

and bearish ears, your shoulder shrug

is nearly human.

- Karen Terrey

The night before, a Park Ranger led this class on a night hike and activities so that today each student wore a Junior Ranger Badge on their shirt. This is the kind of life-long relationship building with nature and stewardship that Federal funding cuts sabotage, decades into the future.

As we walked towards the lake, we listened and looked and sniffed around us in the park, pretending to be inside the body of whichever animal we wanted to be. One student wrote a poem about a tree they passed that held a hollow for an owl to live. Another wrote about the green water and what might lie beneath it for a trout. A third wrote about a funny moment the night before when a bat chased a mosquito too closely around an adult's head on their night walk.

This poem below by Amy Lowell helped each student to introduce an unanswered question into their poems: 

The Trout   Amy Lowell

          Naughty little speckled trout,

          Can't I coax you to come out?

          Is it such great fun to play

          In the water every day?

 

          Do you pull the Naiads' hair

          Hiding in the lilies there?

          Do you hunt for fishes' eggs,

          Or watch tadpoles grow their legs?

 

          Do the little trouts have school

          In some deep sun-glinted pool,

          And in recess play at tag

          Round that bed of purple flag?

 

          I have tried so hard to catch you,

          Hours and hours I've sat to watch you;

          But you never will come out,

          Naughty little speckled trout!

 

How old are you, Tree? What do you want, Fox? This was a technique that helped them go deeper into their poems and understand that a poem can be an "imagination conversation" with something other than yourself. A poem can become a call, an open-ended wondering. They practiced making their imagination the first tool they picked up to write about these creatures and their homes, places that are also our homes.  

 

Did I mention yet the wonderful and caring attention the chaparoning parents gave these students, guiding them through inevitable challenging moments of hiking, camping, writing and working with others?