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Jake Danna Stevens / Staff Photographer Poet Jennifer Hill of Lancaster works with Hilary Mendes, 11, during a poem writing class at George Bancroft Elementary School in Scranton on Thursday.

Line breaks were the lesson topic in Kara Ware's fifth-grade classroom at George Bancroft Elementary School, and poet-in-residence Jennifer Hill tried to keep it simple.

In poetry, the end of a line is sort of like a punctuation mark, interrupting the flow and causing the reader to pause, she told the students Thursday. Where the line breaks, where that pause happens, can be used to dramatic or humorous effect.

For example, she said, take the line, "You smell roses." Break the line after the second word, and it becomes something else.

"You smell," Ms. Hill told the class, waiting as the children's laughter rippled through the classroom, before finishing, "Roses."

"You hear the difference in the meaning, right?" she asked. "It makes you giggle a little bit."

For the past two weeks, students in the fourth- and fifth-grade classes at Bancroft have immersed themselves in verse, reading and writing poetry as Ms. Hill instructed them in her craft.

Aside from demonstrating that an individual can make a living in the arts, Ms. Hill said the program was intended to introduce the children to a creative form of using language while reinforcing some of the literary devices they are already learning, such as metaphor and simile.

"Students already have a tendency to lean toward the musicality of language so they can pick up on rhythm and rhyme like nobody's business," said Ms Hill, a Lancaster resident who has been presenting poet-in-residence programs locally for 13 years.

"Kids really seem to connect with the sound of language. It's playful; it's fun, and some of them are deep thinkers when given the opportunity to express what they feel. It's like they're just waiting."

Heather Medina, 10, said she was kind of familiar with poetry - "stuff that rhymed" - but really didn't understand how imaginative she could be until Ms. Hill's residency.

"Poems are about expressing yourself," she said.

For one assignment, Heather and the other students had to write a poem about color.

Classmate Sarina David, also 10, chose the color blue. Blue, she wrote in her poem, "smells like fresh cold berries on a hot summer day. ... The sound is a raindrop falling from the sky."

"I've learned that with poetry you can express anything you want on a piece of paper," Sarina said. "Sometimes you feel good inside or bad inside and you can express yourself in poetry."

Ms. Hill's residency at Bancroft was made possible through a collaboration of Target, Marywood University, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Northeastern Educational Intermediate Unit and Scranton School District.

Mrs. Ware said the program has brought poetry alive for her students and will become the "springboard" for additional poetry classwork, including a visual poetry project with art teacher Sara Zigon.

"What Jenn has done I will use as a seedling to expand upon for the rest of the school year," she said.

Ms. Hill said she takes something away from each of her programs.

"With some of the students, I was reminded of the fact that I might not reach every single student that I'm working with," she said, "but there are a few that may or may not have known that they had poetry living inside of them."

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