It came from my noodle...

Most of my students were down the hall today taking the OAKS, a standardized test required for all students in Oregon.  The students who hadn't met or exceeded the benchmark were "given the opportunity" to try again.  So most of my students were down the hall with Laura.  All but nine of my 36 sixth graders were off testing, so I was given the opportunity to get a sense for where these nine children were at as far as poetry went (it's national poetry month!).  I asked them how they knew something was a poem, and they said:

It goes down the middle of the page.
Shows your emotions.
It’s expressive.
It goes down the page like a waterfall.
The words go well together.
?
It doesn’t have punctuation.
People talk about their feelings.
Sometimes it can rhyme.
It shows your inner self.
You can use pencils and pens when you write it.
!
It’s in deep thought.
They’re strange.
Sometime they don’t make sense.
You can write something true or made up.
It comes from your heart, not your brain.
It comes from your hand.
It’s on paper.
It comes from your noodle.

Then we wrote poems with the title: "It came from my noodle..."

Together we came up with the following rules for the poem (the first three rules were mine):

10 lines long
at least one word per line
no more than four words per line
it must feature your favorite color
it must use the word banana or shenanigans

Here's what I came up with:

It came from my noodle

Out of the darkness

of clouded bananas,

it came singing.

From the noodle's

depth, it came hungry.

It's song was like

the songs of birds

with bent beaks

under a pale

and scorching sun.

We had fun today, one teacher and nine students.  Then 27 more students and another teacher came back, grumpy from thirty minutes of reading comprehension questions.  And I turned the class back over to Laura, who put in a movie.

I take over full-time on Thursday, after the tests are complete.