Totally Optional Prompt: Abecedarian

I love anything to do with the alphabet.

Last week I asked my poetry-writing students to write an abecedarian. They had fun and their poems were surprisingly good.

I looked online for examples but really couldn't find ones I liked. I'm not even sure where I first saw this form but I liked it at the time and always wanted to try one.

I'm not even sure I have this definition right but here's what I told my kids and it seemed to work well:

An abecedarian is a poem in which you concentrate on one letter of the alphabet at the beginning of your poem then let the words morph into the next letter and then the next. etc. You don't have to begin with A; you can start anywhere you want in the alphabet and go from there. You could even go backwards. Your words don't have to be at the beginning of lines and the letters don't have to begin the words, either. The words can just contain those letters.

Hopefully this makes sense and you have fun playing with the letters.

One more thing: the kids were kind of stumped for a way to begin because there wasn't a specific topic so I told them to write about the last strong emotion they had. And off they went.

So, off you go, too! Write an abecedarian about some strong emotion or anything else! It is totally optional, of course.

Wish I knew how to fix Mr. Linky. I'll write the link in but...who knows! Anyway, come on back starting Wednesday evening and leave your link in the comments if he isn't with us.