Learning from students: Number poems

Here's the second installment in my series on learning through my students and THEIR students. 

Here, Karis uses YOU JUST WAIT with young Hayden who experiments with writing a "phone number" poem. In this form, you write a phone number vertically with each number starting the line of the poem. Then, each line of your poem has as many words as that number. For example, 4 would have 4 words, 7 would have 7 words, and so on, all presented vertically like an acrostic poem. 

First, my student, Karis, created a visual image for the mentor text poem by Janet Wong:

Then, Karis's student, Hayden, created a phone number poem:

My dog is
named Cooper
He barks at my Mom
and at
Dad.
He thinks
he 
is the best guard dog.
But he is not always brave.
When the phone rings, he runs and hides.

Sometimes the form or structure of the poem (number limits per line) pushes us to choose each word carefully while still building the story we want to tell or moment we want to share. Hayden communicated quite a bit about her dog, Cooper, in just 35 words!