City Mission Academy children are writing poetry!  Today they are writing about their families, their favorite colors, Halloween costumes and attitudes.

“Attitude, attitude Miss Chris says I have an attitude, my mom says I have an attitude too!” is part of a poem fifth-grader Dejanae Green wrote during her time with writing coach Chris Doyle.

Once a week, Doyle and writing coach Mary Shannahan, provide CMA children with a writer’s workshop that reinforces their classroom instruction and exposes them to a new world of creativity with language, technical skills and self expression.

“There were some children at the beginning that didn’t like to write, didn’t want to write, were not going to write and now they are the ones you can’t get to stop,” said Shannahan.

The emphasis of the program is to expose the children to rich vocabulary in various writing styles and encourage them to use similar techniques in their writing.

“We knew that part of our goal would be to surround them and immerse them in a lot of language and have them take that language, learn how to manipulate it and write it,” said Doyle a retired elementary teacher.

“We bring in authors and we read, read, read,” she said. “We make the children pay attention and notice, how this writer is writing and what that writer does when he writes.  We always want the kids to think, ‘I can do that. I see what this author is doing and I can do that too.’”

The program began in September introducing the children first to fiction writing and learning how to write from their own experience. Now they are learning poetry and how to manipulate language. Next they will learn to write letters and reports.

“They have really come a long way,” said Doyle. “I think we are starting to see some enormous growth.”

A larger paper ‘poet-tree’ is taped to a wall way at City Mission Academy. On it are the poems and pictures of smiling students displaying their best written works.

“While the untrained eye might walk by the poetry tree and not see tremendous substance, we see children that are taking tremendous risk,” Doyle said.  “For us this is a celebration.”

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