Spring Acrostic Poems

I hang out with the coolest group of homeschool moms on the planet. I love them, and I love my interactions with them. Recently on our email forum some of them have been posting their spring inspirations. Some took photographs, some wrote poetry, and some just told of their beautiful thoughts on Springtime. It left me just itching to be creative! 

Last night Aaron and I were sitting around, he was working on some things for work. I was telling him how all day I'd been craving the way it feels to write with a permanent marker on a nice thick piece of paper, but that since I don't really draw or doodle, I didn't know what I'd do on the paper with the markers. He suggested I just start, and see what happened. 

This is what happened. I came up with a fun poetry activity to do with my kids! Apparently my poetry skills never got past elementary school. Forget deep and moving, forget lovely, powerful language. Acrostic poems are what it's all about. I guess. Ha! I don't know why I like acrostic poems so much. But I wrote this one as an example to show the kids. 

So this morning, I started out by asking them to tell me all the things that came to mind when they thought of spring. I wrote their ideas on the whiteboard. They came up with things like baby animals, clouds, flowers, rain, kites, gardening, wind, blossoms, etc. 

Then I asked them to pick just one of those things, clouds, for example. And write down as many descriptive words as they could things of just to describe clouds. Examples: fluffy, lots, white, dark, stormy, angry, heavy, puffy, floating, changing, etc. 

Once each kid had a list of descriptive words to work with, I wrote the letters SPRING on the board vertically. Then I wrote their descriptive words and their topic off to the side. Together we all looked a the words we might be able to use in SPRING. It was rewarding to see them catch on. There were obvious ones, like Adelia's choice of 'run' for the letter R to describe rabbits. And then there were ones that came about more slowly. Ivan chose crickets and had described them as loud, musical, chirping, which were great words, but didn't fit with our letters. But eventually we decided that calling the crickets instruments would work for all three of those AND fit for his letter 'I'. 

Anyways, I felt like acrostic poems were a really good exercise in brainstorming and (for some of my T4s) understanding that it's ok to put ideas out there, even if they aren't perfect, even if they aren't fully formed, and even if you don't use all of them. (This concept was incredibly hard for Lincoln, and extremely easy for Adelia.) 

Writing acrostic poems was also excellent practice in word choice. We were able to talk about synonyms, and how some words have the same meaning as others, and some words mean almost but not quite the same things as others. And I also thought it was great for practicing how to describe something. I noticed that when the kids first picked their topic and were asked to come up with descriptive words, the words were very bland (big, fast, soft, etc.) but once we needed to fit the descriptions to a certain letter of the poem, they had a dig a little deeper, and come up with more interesting words. 

I also found that it was really helpful for everyone to talk through each person's poem out loud together, I thought that was really valuable, and got thoughts generating better, and kept frustration down, because one person wasn't on the spot to come up with all the ideas on their own. 

Here are the poems the kids came up with. I love them all. They are currently decorating our downstairs closet door. :)