Poetry Unit

Yay! The time has finally come! I pre-ordered the book Explore Poetry! With 25 Great Projects, and then day-dreamed and drooled over all the fun things we were going to get to do out of it. And it's finally come! And we started right in. I love it already.

This was such a nice break (for me) from Math and Science, I could have cried. Oh the joys of literature! My heart has found it's happy place. And maybe, just maybe, I can bestow some of my love for this subject onto my children..by force, if necessary. Ha! (Fat chance.)

The first thing we did was talk about what poetry is exactly. The book gave us some awesome examples of poems, and we dissected them. It was glorious!

AND....I think Lincoln actually enjoyed it a little bit. We were reading a excerpt from The Odyssey, and looking up some vocab words in the glossary to try and figure out what the story was that the poem was trying to tell us. And Lincoln got really excited about it (I think because he's read an Usborne Young Readers version of The Odyssey, and likes the story) and wanted to look up all the words, not just the ones I'd assigned.

We also made Poetry Journals, because in later chapters we'll be writing poetry of our own.

Later in the week, we talked about different kinds of poems. Then we focused specifically on acrostic poems. Each person brainstormed the letters of their name in their poetry journal, until they found things that they were happy with and made them into a finished product to hang on the wall in the school room.

I about busted a gut laughing at Ivan's. I don't know if he was being funny on purpose, but his poem is so hilarious.

It's like he's saying, "Normally I'm really good at art, but I don't like this poetry stuff." But in saying that, it's actually a really clever poem. Which means he IS good at the art of poetry (whether he's trying to be or not), and so it's an oxymoron. And it makes me so happy. And I laugh whenever I read it.

Next time we're doing "Found Poems" I think. I've never done one of those, so that will be fun.