Poetry Workshop Week

April is poetry month! I spent the first week of the month putting on a mini-poetry workshop for my kids.

Someday my goal is to refine this workshop, make it bigger, and invite other homeschoolers to do it with us. I envision rotating stations, where at each station kids learn about a different kind of poetic form or feature, and then, after every group has rotated through each station, coming together for a poetry slam. At the poetry slam all the kids will have the opportunity to read the poems they've written at each station to the big group. But anyways, that's going to be at some future point. Right now I'm practicing my ideas on my own guinea pigs kids. :)

We spent almost all of last year's poetry time writing acrostic poems. We've recently done magnetic poetry on the refrigerator. And I didn't have any magazines on hand to cut out of to have the kids do collage poems. So I started with Haiku, because it seemed the next easiest after all the things I mentioned above. It's the first time my kids have been exposed to a poetic form that required a certain number of syllables. But we've learned to count syllables from our All About Spelling curriculum, so it wasn't a totally new concept. They grasped it quickly.

All three big kids seemed to really enjoy haikus. They each wrote three. I can't find Ivan's or Adelia's but here are Lincoln's:

Wind
Wonderful, breezy,
Blowing, lovely, soft, nice, wind.
Breezy, wonderful.

Clouds
Floating, breezy, fun
Puffy, raining on my house.
Clouds are wonderful.

Cats
Soft, lovely, cute fur.
Quickly pouncing on grey mice.
I like nice quick cats.

The next day we did shape poems. These were fun, because the kids were able to find tons of examples of them in our collections of children's poetry. They did turn out to be a little trickier to write than we anticipated, getting the poem to have the right number of words to create the shape you're envisioning is a lot easier in theory. :) To try and help with that, we all did a kite poem using the same shape, but filling it in with our own words. Then I turned the kids loose to try whatever shape they wanted to. Again, I can't find Ivan's notebook, but he wrote a cool one about blowing a bubble, and another about families that was in the shape of a heart. Here is Adelia's kite poem:

Out my window is a sunny-windy day.
Gathering glue, paper, ribbon,
A string. I did it! A homemade kite.
Unwinding the string, my kite goes flying!
Left and right. Up and down.
Carried by the wind.
A colorful jewel floating with the birds.

And Lincoln's kite poem (just imagine it in the the same shape, I didn't get a picture.):

A last kite soaring skyward.
Small, smaller. Getting away.
Was so fun.
Was so cool.
And now it's gone.

The trickiest form we tried this week was Limericks. They are hard because not only do they have a rhyme scheme, and a syllable pattern, but they have stressed and unstressed syllables. Think of the nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock.

HICKory, DICKory, DOCK
the MOUSE ran UP the CLOCK
the CLOCK struck ONE
the MOUSE ran DOWN
HICKory, DICKory, DOCK.

We also discovered that not all limericks stick strictly to the number of syllables they are 'supposed' to have. This created a good discussion about how poetic forms are not exact things, but more like guidelines to follow as closely or as loosely as the poet chooses. This concept was super frustrating for several of my children who like to stick to the rules. Instead of putting too much stress on them to author their own limerick, we decided to read plenty of funny examples of limericks and get everyone laughing. Lincoln ended up being the only one to compose his own, and this is it:

Fish
There once was a very big fish
Who had just one simple wish:
To ride on a cloud
But he was so loud
That the cloud threw him off with a swish.


And that was our workshop. It was really fun. And I think the bones are good for my big plans, I just need to get a few things refined, and figure out how to make the stations work for a larger group. I'm also thinking I need to add in somewhere and element of peer review and personal revision, because that is a huge important step in the writing process, and it's good to learn how to give and take constructive criticism. But all in all, I am happy with how this week went. I really enjoyed sharing something I love with my kids. And I hope someday down the road to be able to share it with others too.