Teaching poetry to fifth graders is like trying to round up fireflies.

 I honestly can say, I have never tried to round up fireflies. Maybe you have, and I admire you.

 - actually I envy you. Catching fireflies is definitely high up on my bucket list.

     As a small girl, I read so many stories with children collecting fireflies in a jar and imagined what it must be like to do that. Living in Colorado, the only bugs I ever caught were mosquitoes sucking blood from me. I may have trapped a couple unsuspecting caterpillars and crickets and grasshoppers.   Yet, our dry climate dictates our insect experiences.  There aren't many.

    You may read the title and wonder what I mean by teaching poetry is like trying to round up fireflies.  Many of my students have only ever experienced rhyming couplets or haikus. They love Haikus, by the way.  I think it is because there is a formula and while it doesn't have to be restricted to a nature theme, nature really speaks to children. 

They can write Haikus 

until the sun goes to sleep 

or class is over

    I am a published poet. Not a famous one because I am still living and breathing(poet joke). I do have a true love of all things poetry. Maybe it is not needing to debate punctuation rules when writing poetry that makes me love it more. I am not a rule breaker so the freedom to break rules in poetry makes me jump for joy. Plus, poets don't debate the Oxford comma, which I still use. Teaching poetry should be easy, for me right?

    Well, teaching poetry to my students feels like sending them on a hunt for fireflies where none exist.  What's a stanza? Why isn't it called a paragraph? Do I get a bad grade if I use punctuation? What do mean I don't need periods? I don't get it, why do we need to write poetry?

    And then it happens, the one student in the class who shows me a piece of writing that makes me tear up because there it is. So raw and real. The emotion dripping off the page. The writing of a 10 year old that screams Potential Poet Laureate. Like catching something in a jar that you have never seen.  Like the fireflies I can only imagine being caught on a summer's night I have yet to experience.

    I snap a picture of their writing. They smile. The next day they come back they ask me why I took a picture of the poem. And then it hit's me.  This must be what catching fireflies in a jar feels like. I tell her, "I want to savor the moment your words touched my heart." They stand up taller and walk back to their chair beaming like a whole jar of fireflies in a jar. I think my Bucket List got a little shorter.