Egg moon

This is an idea from Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.

A bit pressed for time, here's my explanation from 2007 when I introduced them:

"In his book he has a whole series of what he calls poetry warm ups. It's a way of getting some thoughts down on paper that might with some rearranging, cutting and editing, become a poem or the seed of a poem.

Some are templates, so each line begins the same. Some are the seed to write a series of related ideas. Most have some repetition in them to help get things flowing. Don't be discouraged if your first dozen lines or more are trite. That's just the clogs coming out of your creative pathways :-) But that stuff needs to get out onto paper so the path can be freed for better ideas to flow more freely."

In addition to the regular writing prompts, I'll post one of these warm ups too.

Today's warm up is comparisons.

Include "like" or "as" in each line. The lines can be all about the same thing, or about one subject, or all different.

Some examples of templates:

______ is like ______.

______ is as ______ as ______.

Here are some examples from kids in Kenneth Koch's class:

A butterfly is like a flying rainbow.
Clouds are like flying ice cream.
Hair is like spaghetti.
The sun is as red as a fire.
The moon is like an egg.
Slow is like vanilla ice cream.
A moon is like a banana.
Thunder is like bowling.
Black ink is dark as m idnight.
Snow is as white as the sun shines.
A rose is as red as a beating of drums.