Students enrolled in Mount Airy City Schools enjoyed a four-day “April Fools for Poetry” Festival to celebrate National Poetry Month. The Poetry Festival offered students multiple ways to interact with poetry, discover joy in spoken words, and improve their literacy skills.
Students were welcomed on Monday morning that week with sidewalk chalk poems and art at school entrances, and school hallways were covered with poem posters. B.H. Tharrington Primary students held Poetry Walks throughout the week to view and respond to the poem posters. The rhythms of poetic language were shared in English, Spanish, Chinese, Romanian, and German. The impact of poetry was found across subject disciplines, including science, math, history, and social studies.
Students throughout the district read poems during the morning announcements. At J.J. Jones Intermediate, poems were read by Alanna Swartz, Cooper Barnes, Lucy Bennett, and Jayden Martinez. Also at Jones, students designed a Poet-Tree Wall to share their original poems and display the “found” poems they created from narrative texts.
Mount Airy High School hosted a student poetry contest, with the first-place prize going to ninth grade student Rhiannon Welch for her poem entitled, “An Ode to the Embrace of Good and Evil.” Other student winners included Sergio Garcia Barrios, who won second place for his poem “Where I’m From,” and Abby Moser, who won third place for her poem “Ode to Stories.” Honorable Mentions were earned by students Mercedes Hawks and Taylor O’Brien.
The high school poetry contest was judged by local author Frank Levering, a Mount Airy High School alumnus (Class of 1970) and local orchardist. Levering studied poetry at Wesleyan University with U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur and at Harvard Divinity School with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop. Levering’s nine books include a book of poetry, “Blue Light,” and co-authorship of the book “Simple Living,” which was developed into a PBS series of the same name, based in Mount Airy. Levering stated, “This Poetry Festival will open doors for students, and meets needs in a new way here in Mount Airy.”
Poetry contest winners were announced during an Open Mic event Monday afternoon at the high school’s Blue Bear Café. Staff and students of various grade-levels shared poems in multiple languages, including fourth grader Sylvia Leiva, who read a poem in Spanish, and eleventh grader Noah Khuri, who read in Chinese.
Some students at the event recited original poems, while others recited from well-known poets. Special guests to the Open Mic included retired educator Emma Jean Tucker, who read poems written by Langston Hughes, the poet inspired her love of poetry; local storyteller Terri Ingalls, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley. Students from Club WriteNow!, the high school’s creative writing club, shared original poems and were a highlight of the festival’s launch event.
The Poetry Festival was directed by Juliana Caldwell, who serves as an executive assistant to the superintendent and to the Mount Airy City Schools Board of Education. She also holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Goddard College.
“Kids of all ages love words and sounds, and are learning every day how to express themselves in better ways,” Caldwell said. “The sounds and music of poetry can make learning fun,” said added, quoting a March 5 article in the Washington Post about how poetry benefits children, stating that poetry has a “way of expressing complex ideas, often in a short, simple format,” and “is important for their social-emotional development.”
To close the four-day festival, a “Fools for Poetry” video was created by district staff and made available for students to enjoy on April Fools’ Day. One elementary teacher stated “I loved the opportunity for the students to share! I was thrilled to feel the passion that the students had for their poems.” A high school teacher shared, “We have very talented students at our school. I’m thankful we are able to find ways to recognize students for more than just athletics or honors societies.”
The festival was made possible by a gift in honor Keppel Hagerman, the pen name of teacher Polly Long’s mother, who had the heart of a Southern Poet and was loved and respected by all who knew her. Additionally, the school system gave special thanks to The North Carolina Poetry Society and the Winston-Salem Writers, who provided 36 “Poetry in Plain Sight” posters for the schools.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
Be First to Comment