It’s the weekend and I’m going easy on you today. I decided to go a little retro so this might look familiar to a few of you from last year. You already know I love saving phrases and words from magazine and then taping them on index cards to use as prompts. Another thing I do, because I love to doodle, is glue phrase prompts to a card and then create some doodle art around them. For some reason seeing these decorated cards gets the kids excited (sometimes) and I’m all about using any trick in the book. I have a stash of about 50 of these cards and when I teach I always have some in my back pocket to hand out when someone comes in late and needs a quick assignment or even when they are asking for extra credit. I laminated this (with packing tape) so they hold up well to being passed around a bunch.

What I do with the students is let them pick a card and tell them they can write any kind of poem they want, a haiku, a 5 senses poem, free verse, an acrostic, whatever they feel motivated to do once they get the card.

Here’s the card I picked for us today.

And here’s my poem.

You took
my self-esteem
my laughter
my pride in how I dress
my ability to trust
and to see the good in most people

You took
my dog, my cat
my good credit rating and almost,
my car

You took
my trust
my friends
my music

You gave back
a broken heart
a shattered dream
and finally, freedom.

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.