Poetry Friday, Week 13: A Family Literacy Event and Getting Ready for National Poetry Month

Marcie at Marcie Flinchum Atkins is hosting today.  Her book When Twilight Comes is here!  I can't wait for my copy. She's writing about my favorite time of day.
If you have a twilight poem to share, ​tag her: @MarcieFAtkins
Hashtag: #PoetryFriday
Share your link: www.marcieatkins.com/blog

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Family Literacy Night

I was invited as a poet to participate in my friends' elementary school's literacy night this week.  I've subbed in the library when they had librarians and in the classrooms there in the past.  I was over planned for the event with four activities: three were stations and one was a whole group activity.  It was clear that the whole group didn't fit the needs of the night.

The stations included the following:
Station One:  Read Some Poetry
Station Two:  Write a Haiku with Haiku Cubes 
Station Three: Write a 3 line or 6 line poem using the Poetry Cubes
As I set up the stations, I realized that I had three risk levels: low for the reading poetry books, medium risk for using the Poetry Cubes, and high for using the Haiku Cubes.  I set up examples on a chart.  And I made sure to pull some of the more adult words from the Haiku Cubes (IYKYK).

Families came in and out the whole hour.  What I didn't plan on was that a few students just wrote a poem on their own.  I had cards, tags, and library pockets for them to create a "Poem in a Pocket", thinking they could copy the  poem they wrote from the station.

​It reminded me of how much fun I had during the years I helped family library nights at my school

National Poetry Month: Verse of Ages Daily Word Prompts

I belong to the Oregon Writers' Colony.  Every year, they publish a word list for April and follow up with a reading.  When I had my "Poetry Rocks" group, we attended and share poems.
With my book getting ready to launch, I have the bandwidth to participate with these little word nuggets.  I hope you can join me and are inspired by the words. My friend and creator of the list, Susan Blackaby, says this: 
To celebrate National Poetry Month, OWC is once again hosting Verse of Ages.
Get ready for a month of prompts and myriad ways to stretch your imagination!
Skip the rules and see how words spark ideas and then go where they take you. Here are some ways to use the prompts, but these are just guidelines:

• Use the word-of-the-day in a poem.
  
• Free associate to see where the word takes you.
  
• Build a web of connected ideas and images to add to your quiver.
  
• Change the word’s part of speech.
  
• Use the word to build a compound word.
  
• Brainstorm a list of rhyming words, slant rhymes, words that repeat the consonant sounds, words that repeat the vowel sounds.
  
• Explore the word’s synonyms and antonyms.
  
• Dig through a Thesaurus or mine the adjacent words in a dictionary.
  
• Combine words on consecutive days and work them into a single poem.
  
• Short or long; formal, blank, or free verse; topical or fanciful or anything in between—your choice. Wind up your imagination and let it spin.

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Save the Date

The next Poetry Pop-Up Writing Salon will be on Saturday, April 11, 2026.  It will be at 11 AM EST.
It's going to be a busy weekend for me as I am hosting on Friday, April 10.  Perfect way to celebrate National Poetry Month.