Poetry Friday on Twitter & Facebook

Today I am sharing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Nature. It's a lovely poem using the image of a mother coaxing her child away from toys at bedtime, which hits home for me these days.

As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,

   Leads by the hand her little child to bed,

   Half willing, half reluctant to be led,

   And leave his broken playthings on the floor,

Still gazing at them through the open door,

 Read the rest of the poem here.

I have been experimenting with using Twitter in the library lately, playing with Twitpic and using my iPod Touch to throw up photos of what is going on in the school library. We only have three weeks left of the school year so it seems like a good time for messing around. I think it's pretty cool that I can whip out my iPod and take a quick snap of something that the kids are doing and share it so easily. Has anyone else started doing this? The camera on the iPod Touch is not great so the pictures aren't print quality, but it's fun on the fly.

Now I am wondering about how to share poetry that way. Last week when the fifth grade was in the library they were talking about sharing poetry online and one of the kids asked the teacher if she had poetry on her iPod. I had to jump in and say I have that. There's a poetry app for that! The Poetry Foundation has got you covered. We all laughed but it's true. I can easily send poetry links to Twitter and Facebook. The difference between that and blogging is that the blog post stays up and is easy to find by anyone, while the Twitter feed flashes past and is easily missed. The Facebook page flashes by also, and I don't share that with everyone like I do the blog.

But blogging takes time, and I have that in short supply these days. I am really struggling to find the time it takes to write a good post so they are getting infrequent. I'm wondering about using Twitter for Friday Poetry posts. My Twitter feed is posted here, in the sidebar, and my blog is linked on my Facebook page. So if I share poems on Twitter it goes around in a circle. If a lot of us are sharing poetry we can connect and make it grow.

Anyone else up for a little experiment? Let's try sharing poems on Twitter with the hashtags #PoetryFriday and #Poetry and see where it takes us! If you know another hashtag in use or have other suggestions for how to make it work please leave a comment. Maybe we can use the list feature? Let's play!

The Friday Poetry round up today is hosted by Julie at The Drift Record. Enjoy!

School Poetry Wiki

I've been working all April on gathering poetry from around the school where I am a Library Media Specialist. (Click the image above for a direct link). I've pulled projects and examples of student work from each grade and used a wide variety of apps and tools to showcase what the kids are doing. It's been a lot of fun and I am really proud of their range of work. Take a look at pre-k poetry, kindergarten's creative response to Christina Rossetti poems, first grade haiku, second grade wordle words clouds of poems, and original poems from students in the older grades. There are also a couple short animoto videos of authors George Ella Lyon and John Steven Gurney, our visiting authors over the last two years. If you have a (free) wikispaces account you can leave a comment on the discussion pages. My students would love to hear your positive, encouraging feedback!

Friday Poetry round up is hosted at Family Bookshelf today. Love your Mother & enjoy a great weekend of poetry and springtime!