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October 12, 2010

Poet keeps 'em laughing, writing at Salem school

Amanda McGregor

SALEM — Believe it or not, local fifth-graders are having fun cleaning their rooms — or at least they’re having fun writing about it.

Through a week-long artist-in-residence program at the Witchcraft Heights School, students in all grades worked with children’s author and poet Jeff Nathan, who taught them writing skills through lessons infused with humor and song.

“We’ve been working on writing poems,” said fifth-grade student Nick Capra, whose class wrote a poem about cleaning their rooms and learned about alliteration, lines and stanzas, metaphors and more.

“We’re making up (comparisons) with him,” said Capra’s classmate Lizzy Embick, “like how your room is like a dungeon.”

Nathan, an Andover resident, said it was a treat to spend a full week at Witchcraft Heights.

“It’s a lot of fun to work with the kids for a while and see what’s going on in their heads,” said Nathan, whose books include “Calling All Animals,” and “There’s a Hippo in my Locker.”

Grade five teacher Kathy Marchetti raised $6,000 to pay for the program, securing a $1,000 grant from the Salem Education Foundation, donations from the PTO and a school fundraiser, and a $3,000 matching grant from the Essex County Community Foundation.

“It’s a nice change for the students anytime we have somebody from the outside coming in,” said Marchetti, “and it’s inspirational to them. He can tell them about what he’s done, and he can read them his poems.”

On a recent morning, Nathan guided two first-grade classes through exercises on rhyming and descriptive language using stuffed animals as props.

At one point, he dipped behind a book case and returned with a bird mask on top of his head and ran around the room flapping his arms and squawking, prompting peals of laughter. Then he asked the children to come up descriptions of the bird, and they responded with words like “loud, large, orange beak, and black and purple.”

For the next several weeks at the school, every student will take what they’ve learned and work on creating a poem that will be part of a school-wide poetry book that will be published before the holidays, Marchetti said.

“All of these things will stay with them,” she said.

Staff writer Amanda McGregor can be reached at amcgregor@salemnews.com.

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