So, I'm going to take a brief intermission from poetry to discuss a recent tweet from @rondacbaker.  She had asked, "What makes a great YA dystopian novel"?  Now, you know how I like to wax philosophical about all things YA, so I mulled this around in my head for days and here's what I've come up with:

Besides the obvious requirement that the main characters should be teenagers and therefore the plot should directly involve them and their lives, I think a great dystopian novel mimics the entire world of a teenager.  I mean, lets face it, adolescence is a dystopia!  Every teen thinks that they are living a life that is repressed and controlled.  Therefore, the dystopia would have to reinforce their ideas on what would be (or is) the most horrible things conceivable, i.e. lack of choice/no free will, no foreseeable future, parents agreeing with the forces that be and encouraging the teens to follow the rules of the land (instead of protecting their kids against it), sexual/romantic tensions that they don't know how to handle, etc.  All of these things would create a world that any teenager could relate to, and yet, no teenager would care to live in.

And that is what a great YA dystopian novels does; it takes what already scares or upsets teens and it blows it out of proportion, but not too much.  Great dystopias are ones we can believe are possible, And yet, you can still close the page and return to a world that isn't so terrible after all.

So, here is the web that I created from my T-Charts, and from the web, my students created lists of figurative language to use. 

So, for mine, I did things like:  white water, splash! splish!, smooth as glass, boat was swimming, sun was a light bulb, the river snakes through, the leaves are a green curtain, etc.  

From this, we crafted the poem.  Mine is below:

Climb into the kayak

from off the dock

I push off and start to paddle

My paddle

cuts through the water;

A knife through hot butter.

Swoosh!  Splash!  Swoosh!  Splash!

The boat is swimming to

my least favorite spot,

but it's a necessary 

passage

to open water.

This part of the Catawba is

a tangle of roots;

the water

barely deep enough

to cover them.

"Stay in the middle,"

I tell myself.

Spanish moss,

full of God-knows what,

hangs down

like a green curtain

I must part to

get out.

The river snakes through the shallow bed,

and finally a breakthrough!

--the open Catawba River.

My kayak races through the flat water,

smooth as glass.

Without white water,

I fly across the expanse toward

the big brown bridge 

that is my cue

to turn for

home.

I love poetry.  And I have taught it roughly the same for the last 9 years or so.  So this year, I thought I'd switch it up and bit, and instead of crafting a different type of poem for their portfolio entries, I thought I would have them craft one poem (from a memory or topic they loved) and then have them rework that same poem, focusing on a different aspect of poetry each time, i.e. tone/mood, theme, figurative language, etc.  So their portfolio would all be the same topic, same poem really, just altered to highlight a new aspect of poetry each time.  We'll see how that goes!

At this point in the lesson, they have crafted an original poem about a topic they love.  For collection purposes, we started with T-charts like the ones below:

Best	Worst		First	Last
dinner	dinner		job
date	date		day of school	day as a student
vacation	vacation/trip		time I saw my kids	time I say my Grandpa
job	job
friend	enemy
Hobbies	Skills		Favorite Things	Least Favorite Things
cooking	teaching		football	nails on a chalk board
kayaking	reading		my children	failure
swimming	singing		music	laundry
reading			water anything

Then we choose one of the subjects, one we could really talk alot about and we created a web of that topic with all the words that popped in our heads from that topic.  I chose kayaking, because it is almost kayaking season and I love it!! I'll  upload my web and the resulting poem after bit.  (The students are coming! LOL)