Today's poem comes from The Street Beneath My Feet, written by Charlotte Guillain and illustrated by Yuval Zommer.
The blog of a teacher educator discussing math, science, poetry, children's literature, and issues related to teaching children and their future teachers.
Sunday, April 18, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 18
Saturday, April 17, 2021
Onward with the Progressive Poem
Heidi Mordhorst of my juicy little universe gave me these two lines to choose from:
With acorns and moss could we fashion a critter?ORLet's find pine needles, turn into vine knitters!
Why did she have to make it so hard?! Read on to see which one I chose!
I’m a case of kindness – come and catch me if you can!Easily contagious – sharing smiles is my plan.I’ll spread my joy both far and wide,As a force of Nature I’ll be undenied.Words like, “how can I help?” will bloom in the street.A new girl alone on the playground – let’s meet, let’s meet!We can jump-skip together in a double-dutch round.Over, under, jump and wonder, touch the ground.Friends can be found when you open a door.Side by side, let’s walk through, there’s a world to explore.We’ll hike through a forest of towering treesFind a stream we can follow while we bask in the breeze.Pull off our shoes and socks, dip our toes in the icy spring waterWhen you’re with friends, there’s no have to or oughterWhat could we make, with leaves and litter?Let's find pine needles, turn into vine knitters!
I'm a nature girl at heart, so choosing where to go next left so many possibilities. Here are the lines I came up with ...
We'll be swingers of birches and climbers of treesORWe'll lie on our backs and find shapes in the sky
I'm happily handing this off to Linda Baie at Teacher Dance and can't wait to see which one she'll choose and where she will take us on this collaborative adventure.
April 1 Kat Apel at Kat Whiskers
2 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
3 Mary Lee at A Year of Reading
4 Donna Smith at Mainly Write
5 Irene Latham at Live your Poem
6 Jan Godown Annino at BookseedStudio
7 Rose Cappelli at Imagine the Possibilities
8 Denise Krebs at Dare to Care
9 Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche
10 Molly Hogan at Nix the Comfort Zone
11 Buffy Silverman
12 Janet Fagel at Reflections on the Teche
13 Jone Rush MacCulloch
14 Susan Bruck at Soul Blossom Living
15 Wendy Taleo at Tales in eLearning
16 Heidi Mordhorst at my juicy little universe
17 Tricia Stohr-Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect
18 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
19 Carol Varsalona at Beyond Literacy Link
20 Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge
21 Leigh Anne Eck at A Day in the Life
22 Ruth Hersey at There is No Such Thing as a God-forsaken Town
23 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse
24 Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference
25 Shari Daniels at Islands of my Soul
26 Tim Gels at Yet There is Method
27 Rebecca Newman
28 Catherine Flynn at Reading to the Core
29 Christie Wyman at Wondering and Wondering
30 Michelle Kogan at More Art 4 All
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 17
Today's poem comes from Ocean Sunlight: How Tiny Plants Feed the Seas, written by Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm and illustrated by Molly Bang.
Friday, April 16, 2021
Poetry Friday and NPM 2021 - Found Poem 16
Welcome Poetry Friday friends! This year for National Poetry Month I'm writing and sharing found poems, most of which are science- or nature-themed. You can learn more about this form and my plans in this post describing the project. I'm also sharing these found poems as images on my Instagram in case you want to see them all in one place.
Today's poem comes from pages 4, 8, 26, and 28 of One Well: The Story of Water on Earth, written by Rochelle Strauss and illustrated by Rosemary Woods.
Thursday, April 15, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 15
Today's found poem comes from How Ben Franklin Stole the Lightning, written and illustrated by Rosalyn Schanzer.
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 14
Today's poem comes from Strange Creatures: The Story of Walter Rothschild and His Museum, written and illustrated by Lita Judge.
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 13
Today's poem comes from Snowflake Bentley, written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and illustrated by Mary Azarian.
Monday, April 12, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 12
Today's poem comes from p. 8, 12, 14, 16, 30, 41, 50, 144, 161, 163, and 168 of The Slowest Book Ever, written by April Pullley Sayre and illustrated by Kelly Murphy.
Sunday, April 11, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 11
Today's poem comes from p. 24-25 of The Dirt on Dirt, written by Paulette Bourgeois and illustrated by Martha Newbigging.
Saturday, April 10, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 10
Today's poem comes from p. 15, 80-81, 99, and 160 of Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry, written by Neil deGrasse Tyson with Gregory Mone.
Friday, April 09, 2021
Poetry Friday and NPM 2021 - Found Poem 9
Welcome Poetry Friday friends! This year for National Poetry Month I'm writing and sharing found poems, most of which are science- or nature-themed. You can learn more about this form and my plans in this post describing the project. I'm also sharing these found poems as images on my Instagram in case you want to see them all in one place.
Today's poem comes from pages 7, 20, and 48 of Project Seahorse, written by Pamela S. Turner with photographs by Scott Tuason.
Thursday, April 08, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 8
Today's poem comes from Chapter 5 of John Muir: America's First Environmentalist, written by Kathryn Lasky and illustrated by Stan Fellows.
Wednesday, April 07, 2021
For the Love of Spiders and Spi-ku
If you can't quite make out the text, here's what Calvin opines.
Like delicate lace,
so the threads intertwine,
Oh, gossamer web
of wondrous design!
Such beauty and grace
wild nature produces …
UGHH, look at the spider
suck out that bug’s juices!
While many folks focus on the "yuck factor," spiders are truly fascinating creatures. Leslie Bulion has fully captured how amazing they are in both verse and prose in Spi-ku: A Clutter of Short Verse on Eight Legs. Add in the incredible illustrations by Robert Meganck and you have a masterpiece that even arachnophobes will love.
Bulion is a master of informational texts that marry engaging, kid-friendly poetry with science. I wish her books had been around 33 years ago when I settled into my first classroom, eager to put science books in kids hands that would neither put them to sleep with their didactic approach to content, nor turn them away with the complexity of the writing. Not only were truly exceptional nonfiction science books hard to find back then, but poetry was almost nonexistent. As someone who encourages teachers to integrate poetry and children's literature into content area instruction, Leslie's books are a gift.- Monday (4/5): Picture Books 4 Learning
- Tuesday (4/6): Storymamas
- Wednesday (4/7): The Miss Rumphius Effect!
- Thursday (4/8): Reading to the Core
- Friday (4/9): TeacherDance
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 7
Today's poem comes from The Shape of the World: A Portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright, written by K.L. Going and illustrated by Lauren Stringer.
Tuesday, April 06, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 6
Today's poem comes from p. 10-11 of Will It Blow? Become a Volcano Detective At Mount St. Helens, written by Elizabeth Rusch and illustrated by K.E. Lewis.
Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2021. All rights reserved.
I hope you'll come back tomorrow and see what new poem I've found. Until then, you may want to read previous poems in this series.Monday, April 05, 2021
NPM 2020 - Found Poem 5
Today's found poem comes from p. 6-14 of Girls Who Looked Under Rocks: The Lives of Six Pioneering Naturalists, written by Jeannine Atkins and illustrated by Paula Conner.
Following Butterflies
insects were Maria's favorites
she searched for butterflies
and spiders
brought home caterpillars
moved by
God's attention to
small beings
she painted
extraordinary patterns
nature's beauty
was wide
egg
caterpillar
cocoon
emerging butterfly
metamorphosis
admired
Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2021. All rights reserved.
I hope you'll come back tomorrow and see what new poem I've found. Until then, you may want to read previous poems in this series.Sunday, April 04, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 4
delicate precision
nearly perfect
shimmering liquid
Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2021. All rights reserved.
I hope you'll come back tomorrow and see what new poem I've found. Until then, you may want to read previous poems in this series.Saturday, April 03, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 3
Today's poem is a zentangle poem. Kat Apel does a really nice job describing them on her site. This is similar to blackout poetry, though doodles and lines are used to block and frame the words.

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2021. All rights reserved.
I hope you'll come back tomorrow and see what new poem I've found. Until then, you may want to read previous poems in this series.Friday, April 02, 2021
Poetry Friday and NPM 2021 - Found Poem 2
Welcome Poetry Friday friends! This year for National Poetry Month I'm writing and sharing found poems. You can learn more about this form and my plans in this post describing the project.
Today's found poem comes from p. 176-180 of Charlotte's Web Signature Edition, written by E.B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams.
Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2021. All rights reserved.
I hope you'll come back tomorrow and see what new poem I've found. You can also read previous poems in this series.Thursday, April 01, 2021
NPM 2021 - Found Poem 1
their finds
hints of serendipity
baskets of toys
a gold mine
washed ashore
a duck
a frog
managed a
treacherous journey
goes on and on
Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2021. All rights reserved.
National Poetry Month Project 2021 - Found Poems
I started writing centos a few weeks ago, thinking this would be the focus of my National Poetry Month Project. I even shared this at the Sunday writing session with my Poetry Sisters. However, after a bit of thought, I decided to expand the project and focus on a variety of found poem types.
At the most basic level, found poems are poems composed from words and phrases found in another text. Here is a more comprehensive description from the folks at Poets.org.
Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.
A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.
“Happy poets who write found poetry go pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps. They hold and wave aloft usable artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and broadcasts — all objet trouvés, the literary equivalents of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle. By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts, or interrupted fragments of texts.” — Annie Dillard
Put another way, found poetry is the literary version of a collage. Poets select a source text or texts — anything from traditional texts like books, magazines and newspapers to more nontraditional sources like product packaging, junk mail or court transcripts — then excerpt words and phrases from the text(s) to create a new piece.
Plenty of strong and beautiful poems are made from plain language. You sometimes hear such language in conversation, when people are talking their best. Listen. Sometimes you yourself say wonderful things. Admit it. You can find moving, rich language in books, on walls, even in junk mail. (From such sources you’ll probably find better poems, or better beginnings for poems, than from dictionaries and other word books.)
So, poems hide in things you and others say and write. They lie buried in places where language isn’t so self-conscious as “real poetry” often is.
- The Library of Congress has an amazing teacher's guide and primary source set on creating found poetry from primary sources.
- WordMover is an interactive tool that allows children and teens to create “found poetry” by choosing from word banks and existing famous works; additionally, users can add new words to create a piece of poetry by moving/manipulating the text.
- Kathryn Apel provides ideas on how to create a Zentangle poem.
- Learn more about how Austin Kleon began creating newspaper blackout poems.
- This article from the National Writing Project entitled Uncovering Truths Beneath a Found Poem describes an inspiring lesson leading students through the creation of found poems.
- From the Library of Congress blog is an interesting piece entitled The Writing's on the Wall: Found Poetry in Street Art.