Children’s author Rebecca Kai Dotlich dropped in at Wilson Elementary School Friday.

OK, maybe “dropped in” is something of an understatement.

Dotlich, author of more than 15 children’s books, spent the day at the Kenosha school, offering crash courses on poetry writing to the entire student body. The Indiana-based author was in town for the Kenosha Unified School District’s Battle of the Books celebration Friday night.

Earlier in the day at Wilson, Dotlich said she likes to share poetry with students from kindergarten on up. While she sees children beginning to understand and appreciate it around first and second grade, they often begin to lose their appreciation once they hit fifth grade.

“I think we should do anything we can to keep the love up, that appreciation of words and rhyme,” Dotlich said, adding that many youths don’t realize they are experiencing poetry every time they listen to music with lyrics.

Dotlich managed to keep a group of fourth- and fifth-graders interested up until the end of the school day, with a presentation that included recitations of some of her own poetry. She followed this with an interactive experience, in which she and the students worked on a poem of their own.

Fifth-grader Marco Patino had an idea for the poem’s subject matter.

“What about sandwiches?” he asked.

The students snickered, but Dotlich had a serious answer.

“If we wanted to write a sandwich poem, we could start with something like, ‘I’m building a sandwich as tall as the sky...’” Dotlich said. “Or something like that.”

By a landslide vote, the pupils settled on thunderstorms, then tornadoes, to be the poem’s theme.

Now it was time for some more brainstorming. Dotlich invited the students to bark out words that might fit in this piece of impromptu verse.

“Whirling,” “swirling,” “dizzy,” “booming,” etc. — a white board filled up quickly.

With the clock ticking, Dotlich and the children had just a few precious minutes to fashion these terms into a poem, which they titled “What Does a Tornado Look Like?”

The result:

A spinning storm

of wild blackbirds.

A whirling crowd of cats.

A crashing, booming, dizzy sky.

A thundering of swirling bats.

Not bad stuff for several dozen 10- and 11-year-olds, at the tail end of a long week at school.

Dotlich cautioned that it’s not always that easy for professional, published poets such as herself. She said she often spends weeks polishing a single poem, sometimes whiling away a day trying to settle on a single word.

Anthony Gonzalez-Acompa, a fourth-grader, asked the question that likely at least a few people in the room were thinking: “Do poets make a lot of money?”

“Poets don’t make much money, and that’s the truth,” Dotlich answered. “I do it because I love it.”

There’s another potential benefit, she added later.

“Someday, when you’re older, boys, you’re going to get girlfriends that way — trust me,” Dotlich said.

And with that, a collective “eww!” rang out.