Poetry Invitations

This week in class we got to experience what a poetry invitation would be like, and I know that myself and several others I saw were excited to do something different in class.  I really enjoyed seeing what others produced, especially those that made illustrations to convey the meaning they got from the poem.  Some of those pictures were really awesome.
In my field experience today with the fourth graders we were working on mental images, which I thought was quite coincidental since we had just read and discussed a chapter over mental images in E340 on Monday.  The student I had was struggling to describe his mental images, if he had any at all.  He simply summarized or listed back to me what had just happened, but did not show me what he saw.  I think part of it has to do that when he reads he does not pay attention to what he is reading, not that he cannot comprehend, because he is very capable, just he only reads for surface value instead of making connections and attempting to understand what is happening.