Students get versed in poetry
When Griffin Hong gets nervous, his legs start to bump together.
“If I just sit down on my knees it will stop,” said Griffin, 8.
But on Wednesday night in front of a standing-room-only crowd at a northeast Spokane Starbucks coffee shop, Griffin couldn’t just sit down.
The second-grader from Longfellow Elementary School was reading his poetry for the first time in public. Microphone in hand, he began loudly:
”My mom has brown hair like a bear’s fur…”
Griffin joined several other Longfellow students who wrote poetry for Wednesday’s reading after spending months working on their writing skills with a professional writer.
The program is part of Eastern Washington University’s Get Lit! Writers-in-Residence Project, which places writers in schools. Get Lit! is an annual literary festival, held in April.
Griffin’s class has been working with poet Linda Cooper, who spends three days a week in three different schools, including Longfellow and Garfield elementary schools in north Spokane and North Pines Middle School in the Central Valley School District.
She teaches second-, third-, fourth-, sixth- and eighth-graders.
“These kids have so much to say,” Cooper said. “Once you let them know that anything they experience is interesting, they see that what they experience is worthwhile.”
The Get Lit! Writers-in-Residence program is not unique. There are programs that place writers in schools in Seattle, Portland, Boise and Missoula. In Texas, a group of 60 writers has been working with Houston public schools for 20 years.
The Spokane young writers project, in its second year, has three writers that work in five schools in three school districts, said Marny Lombard, Get Lit! event organizer. They include Cooper and writers Susan Virnig and Renee Roehl.
The program is partially funded through the Get Lit! program and through the school district and focuses primarily on low-income schools.
Other local authors, such as children’s authors Ken Nesbitt and Kelly Milner Halls, will visit rural schools for one day, Lombard said.
In Spokane schools, the writers help enhance the district’s writing curriculum, district officials said.
“It’s nice to be able to take our second-graders deeper into their understanding of writing,” said Heather Miciak, a principal’s assistant at Longfellow.
On Wednesday before the reading, students in Nikki Carney’s second-grade class worked on a new narrative poem. They talked about setting the scene and using the five senses.
“What would you hear at a baseball game; what would you smell in the park?” Cooper asked the students.
They talked about syllables being for writers what the “beat of a drum” is for musicians.
“They are learning how to express themselves in a different way,” Carney said. “So often kids are underestimated, but we’ve seen some great writing this year.”