The Poetry Center's K-12 Education Department has a brand new email address: pceducation@email.arizona.edu

Are you an educator, student, parent, guardian or mentor? Do you have a question about one of our online activities? Are you looking for resources you can't find on the site? Would you like to share what you've written in response to one of our writing exercises? Feel free to send us a note, and we'll get back to you within a week.

You might start by checking out our online creative writing resources, including several new offerings developed in response to the remote learning situation we find ourselves in:

• Our field trip writing activities are now available online, in both English and Spanish. These activities are easily adaptable to at-home, classroom, and individual learning. They feature poems by Arizona poet laureate Alberto Ríos, and were developed in tangent with our 2019-2021 Brave Books theme, which celebrates the literature of the US-México borderlands. Younger students practice writing animal metaphors, while older students write anaphora poems about a place that's important to them.
• For April and May 2020, we offered a Virtual Kids Create to stand in for the monthly kid's day we usually offer in person. These self-paced events include writing activities, a sing-a-long, and a performance (For April, Najima Rainey of Just Najima offered a kid-friendly concert; May features a video performance by children's theater troupe Stories That Soar). You can follow the schedule we've created to experience the full event, or pick and choose activities that work for your classroom or household.
• Our archives include 83 creative writing lesson plans and activities crafted by Writing the Community teaching artists, professional writers who lead workshops in K-12 classrooms all over Tucson. The archive is searchable by grade level and genre; and includes a wide range of lessons on everything from self-expression and Shakespeare to tree houses and the planet Jupiter. We now have two lesson plans, one based on Ofelia Zepeda's poem "Calling on Memory" and one about desert animal sounds, available in Spanish!

Take care and be in touch,

Gema Ornelas and Wren Awry K-12 Education Program Coordinators, UA Poetry Center