Curlew is a small, rural school that rests at the foothills of the Kettle Mountain Range in northeast Washington–home to one of the few remaining gold mines in the United States.  In addition to hard-rock mining, people here mostly make a living out of ranching and logging. 

Over half of our county belongs to the Colville Confederated Tribes or is part of the Colville National Forest, and to give you an idea of our remoteness, the nearest Starbucks is more than 100 miles away! Even though we live in such a remote area, we’re not that different from most kids.

 There are 15 students in our 7th grade class–6 girls and, you guessed it, 9 boys, but only 11 of us are in Ms. Fletcher’s Language Arts class. We’ve been working on two poetry projects. 

The first one we started about a month ago, right before St. Patrick’s Day–limericks.  Limericks have a strict rhyming pattern of aabba and we also have to make sure the “feet” come out right–see if you can figure it out when you read our limericks.  The most perplexing part has been the humor–sometimes it’s hard to come up with a funny punch line that rhymes and has the correct number of stressed syllables.

The second project we’re working on is called a “found poem.”  For this we are using our independent reading choices.  We picked every fifth word in our favorite part of the book until we had 25-50 words.  Next we wrote a poem, that is a combination of those words mixed with our own ideas. 

We hope you enjoy our poems!