For more than 30 years a visiting poet in hundreds of K-12 and post-secondary classrooms, Ingrid has conducted Writing Project workshops nationwide. Author of 5 books of poetry, many articles on writing, and a teaching guide, Ingrid asks "What ‘baggage’ do we as teachers bring to poetry, and how can we overcome our own - and our students’ - resistance to it?" Firmly believing that poetry is for everyone, her playful, free-form activities lead all students to writing success and to the discovery that poetry can be a way of sharing dreams and fears and hopes and values.
"Ingrid is poised, articulate, and relaxed as she orchestrates workshop activities and helps participants to write poems. I would say she ranks in the top 5% of consultants who have visited our project in its twenty-four year history." - Bill Strong, Professor & Director, Utah Writing Project.
View Ingrid Wendt's Resume/Vita, Publications and Workshops.
Level: K-12
- Poetry
- Writing instruction
- Poetry writing for the reluctant learner
Surgeonfish
The Angle of Sharpest Ascending
Poems You Didn’t Know You Could Write: Language Play with Reluctant Readers and Writers
Looking for new ways to “snag” students into writing? This hands-on workshop will help non-writers lose their dread of teaching poetry writing in the classroom through engaging activities that bring out the poet in everyone. Participants begin by looking at “writer’s block” and ways to get around it. Then, with the pressure removed to produce whole poems, they experiment with some of poetry’s building blocks: figures of speech, musical language, rhythm, parallel structures, and repetition.
Using poetry models in Ingrid’s teaching guide "Starting with Little Things," as well as supplementary materials, participants will then explore such poetic conventions as the “protest poem,” the “big brag,” and the “letter poem,” discovering how poems can come from real-life experience. Understanding the importance of process over product, pleasure over labor, participants will learn strategies for responding to student work with positive, honest, and helpful comments.
Ideal for the classroom teacher planning a unit on poetry, or wishing to include poetry into daily or weekly routine, this half- or all-day workshop can be individualized for elementary, middle- and secondary-school audiences (or a mixture of all levels). It can also be offered as a more comprehensive workshop or seminar of two to five days.
Some half-day variations of this workshop:
“Meet IRA/NCTE Standards, Teach Character Counts, Through Poetry Writing in the Classroom”
Poetry in the classroom: frill or tool? This hands-on session for elementary and middle-school audiences will support your hunch that what is learned while writing poems does carry over into all areas of Language Arts, and across the curriculum, actually fulfilling IRA/NCTE state-mandated standards. Poetry writing in the classroom can also be used in conjunction with teaching the Six Pillars of Character:
trustworthiness
respect
responsibility
fairness
caring
citizenship
Ingrid will present a variety of easily-grasped poems, chosen for student appeal, and will lead participants in ways to use these, and others, as springboards for such non-threatening, playful poetry writing activities as:
writing poems in the voices of others, speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves.
turning abstract concepts (trust, respect, etc.) into concrete images and figures of speech.
celebrating wonder and awe of the environment; encouraging stewardship.
The workshop will conclude with an examination of two lists—IRA/NCTE standards and the Pillars of Character—with participants discovering how the writing activities have actually fulfilled many Language Arts requirements as well as led to the internalization of concepts inherent in “character.”