Hi, I鈥檓 Cassidy Kao. I鈥檓 a twelve-year-old author and the founder and CEO of (more on this later). Additionally, I recently led my third poetry workshop at !

优蜜视频 Academy helped me start teaching others and supported me by hosting my poetry workshops, for which I鈥檓 very honored and grateful. The most recent workshop that I led at Academy was 鈥淪hakespeare鈥檚 Tragedies and Sonnets,鈥� based on my most recent book, .

In this latest workshop, I taught students about William Shakespeare then moved onto the characteristics of his tragedies and Macbeth, the star tale of the workshop. Students acted out a scene from the play. Since it was a small class, I played one of the characters and we invited parents to join in so they could provide sound effects! Afterward, I introduced them to the sonnet, and the complicated way that Shakespeare wrote his. Because of the complexity of sonnets, we wrote the first part of a sonnet together so students could take it home and continue writing. To wrap it up, there was a short insult contest where they used words that Shakespeare once used for fun to construct their own Shakespearean insults! It was a really fun class and I hope they left knowing more than they had before.

Conducting workshops like this one is what I do for iPoetTree. iPoetTree is an organization I recently created with the objective to help young, reluctant writers to love writing through poetry. This all started when I was eight. To celebrate National Poetry Month, I wrote a poem a day throughout the month and grew my own Poet Tree on the wall of my hallway. I later published my first book with all of the poems I wrote and instructions on how to write different types of poems. Then, I wrote another book, and another, and another! Most of the books that I wrote included some sort of poetry since poetry was the very thing that started the whole journey. I taught free workshops in my community based on the theme of my books and the poetry that was included in the books. I enjoyed this so much that I decided to create iPoetTree and the website to go along with it.

You can find my website at , where your children will learn how to write different types of poems by watching videos I created. After they聽watch the videos, they can write their own poems and share them with other young writers on the website. I created a curriculum of five levels, with about three to four different types of poems in each, and grouped them by level of difficulty. At the end of each school year, I will select a collection of poems and publish them in a book to help the authors of the selected poems become published.

Please go to my website and help your children sign up and start learning poetry! I really enjoy teaching and, some day, I hope to train others to teach workshops of their own so that I can reach out farther than my community and teach more kids the joy of writing.

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Hi everyone! My name is Cassidy and I am eleven years old. I鈥檓 also the author of , , and another fiction book coming soon! I have many varied interests, from writing poetry to playing the piano to dancing ballet.聽 But when you ask me what my favorite subject is, I would say 鈥楴o idea.鈥� Just kidding! I really enjoy doing math and grammar. (You read that right). In my spare time, I love to read, and enjoy hanging out with my friends to play Minecraft and shoot silly homemade movies.

I am going to lead a free workshop called Poetic, Mythological Constellation Mysteries for an audience of kids from age 5-8 at the 优蜜视频 Academy. This will be the sequel to my previous poetry workshop at 优蜜视频 called the Wonderful World of Poems. The goal of this brand new workshop is to teach my students the mythical stories and science of constellations. I want to encourage them to share any mythological stories they know and to write their own riddles. I鈥檓 also planning a fun activity: making marshmallow constellations!

The reason I want to lead this workshop is that I really like poetry, riddles, and Greek mythology. I like how anybody can write riddles quite easily as long as they know the rules. I enjoyed writing my book and doing this workshop is taking it a step further because I get to teach the kids in person. 聽I love seeing their expressions when they get the meaning of the poem.

One big lesson I learned from leading my previous poetry workshop is that teaching is not easy. It takes a lot of thinking to put together the slides and I was exhausted after the workshop. I鈥檓 going to work extra hard this time to make sure that I鈥檓 a good teacher.聽 I hope that the kids learn something they find enjoyable and will be inspired to write poetry of their own.

This workshop will take place in April in honor the National Poetry Month. I鈥檓 really looking forward to doing the workshop and I hope the kids will enjoy what I鈥檝e planned for them. I鈥檝e put a lot of thought into the slides and the set up for the workshop. (I鈥檓 also very excited for the marshmallows). I hope that you can join me on this mysterious, poetic journey through the constellations.聽 See you there!

APRIL IS POETRY MONTH!
Join us for a one-day poetry workshop lead by our poet-in-resident Cassidy Kao

April 11, 2017 at 11:00am-12:00pm

Register for this free workshop!

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