Poetry Class Week 1

This box is a box of dreams. Inside this box are the beginnings of something I've wanted to put together for a really long time.

A poetry class.

My kids and I are part of a homeschool co-op that meets once a week. The kids get to take all sorts of cool classes offered by cool moms that have different interests and teach in different styles than I do, which I think is really beneficial to my kids, and which my kids love. I teach two classes as part of the deal. And this semester one of those classes is poetry.

I'm roughly basing my lesson plans off of the book Explore Poetry! With 25 Great Projects by  Andi Diehn. But I'm not going in the order suggested, nor am I using all their material, and I am definitely supplementing with some of my own material and ideas.  But, I do really like this book, and highly recommend it, because it breaks down the pieces of poetry into nice bite-sized chunks, and has some really fun ideas and activities to choose from.

So at co-op, I have about 10 students (that includes my three oldest kids) ranging in age from 7-11, but I would say the majority of them are about 9 years old. That's just a tad bit younger than my target age range for this class, but that's ok.

Really the main thing is that in order for this class to go smoothly, the kids need to be really solid readers, and decent writers; it's not spelling and grammar I care about so much as stamina for writing. If the kids don't have a confident grasp on regular reading it's going to a lot harder for them to understand how to play with words to make them do what you want them to do. And as far as writing goes, if getting a few words jotted down on a page is still a pretty hard chore, then getting through a class where you're mainly writing poetry is going to be a really hard chore and not very fun. If you were going to do these lessons one-on-one with a kid, and could be their scribe, that would work just fine. But being a scribe to 10 kids in a class would be near impossible. Anyways, just my two sense before we start.

The very first thing we did in class on day 1 was ruin a perfectly good sheet of notebook paper. Haha! I had all the kids take out their poetry notebooks and open up to the first page. I told them to scribble all over it. After a few weird looks they did it. When the pages were good and covered, I told them to go ahead and crumple up the page without ripping it out of the notebook. Then I told them to flatten it out as best the could and close their books. I told them that their poetry notebooks were a place for ideas, and unfinished things; not pretty, perfect things. I told them part of the writing process was trying something just to see how it felt, then not liking it, scribbling it out, and trying something different. Writers almost never write something the way they want it written the very first time they try. Writing is messy. Creativity is messy. And sometimes it takes a few tries, or a whole slew of tries to get the result that you want. I told them that the reason we messed up their first page is so that they would remember that the notebook wasn't a place for perfection, but a place to "take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!" as Ms Frizzle says. :) I'll be honest, I have about three kids who can't stand it and ask me every single class period if they can rip the messy page out of their notebook because they hate it. (2 of them are my boys.) I encourage them to leave it there.

The Five Senses

The next topic we discussed as a class was descriptive writing. We talked about how good writers use all five of their senses to describe things when they write, not just what they see with their eyes. In the middle of the table I put an orange, a plastic spoon, a pine cone, a wool sock, and a pile of bacon bits. In their notebooks, I had the kids write how they would describe each one of these things by sight. This might include words that would tell you about the size, shape, or color of the object. Then we went through all the other senses and used them to describe the objects on the table. (*I got the idea for this activity from our Bravewriter nature journaling class.)

Now that they'd had some practice, I had them trace their hands onto a piece of paper and write an object of some sort in the middle. I did a pine tree on mine. One of the kids in class did the ocean, one did a cat, another did a bicycle, etc. Then on each finger we wrote one of the senses. Using the area around the fingers the kids came up with words to describe their object according to the different senses. I chose to do each sense in a different color because I think it makes the visual easier, but some of the kids chose not to do it that way, and that's fine too.

Alliteration

Next we switched gears a little bit. I read them a book called Chips and Cheese and Nana's Knees What Is Alliteration? by Brian P. Cleary to introduce alliteration. The book is silly, and has funny cartoony pictures to go along with, and even though it might be a little young for them, I think it does a good job of getting the point across about what alliteration is.

We talked about how alliteration is everywhere, but one of the most recognizable forms it takes is in tongue twisters. I gave them a sheet of tongue twisters and had them get into groups to play around with them and trying to say them as fast as they could. They had a lot of fun with this. I had them glue their tongue twisters into their notebooks.

Once the laughter had died down and I was pretty sure everyone understood the concept, we talked about how alliteration wasn't only for being silly, but that famous writers and poets used it too all the time. I handed out a copy of  a portion of The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, and asked the kids to go through it and circle all the examples of alliteration they could find.

Found Poems

Now that we had a couple literary tools at our belts, I wanted the kids to write poems of their own. Found poems are a really great begging poem to attempt to write, because they are really open-ended. It's hard to go wrong with a found poem. Basically, a found poem is where you find words from a variety of other places, and you bring them together to make a poem. In our case the "other places" were going to be from the pages of old magazines. I put stacks of magazines in front of the kids, and told them to cut out all the words that caught their eye. Once everyone had a pile of words in front of them, I gave them each a piece of construction paper and told them to play around with their words until they found an arrangement that suited them. I told them to keep in mind the things we'd learned today about using our senses in descriptions and about alliterations. And then I turned them loose! And they did great. I was really pleased with how their poems turned out. Here are a few examples.

That was the end of our first class. It went really well! I'll post about our other classes soon. But it's been so awesome to see this come together.

Ollie's Room

Aaron designed curtain rod holders for Ollie's window. 

We still need to fill screw holes and put caps on the end of the rods, but I like the curtain rod holders. They were a little tricky because the air duct makes the ceiling lower right here on this side of the window. 

Ollie's room is 99.5% finished. And it's a good thing, because I am ready to move on to something else. But I love how it turned out! His room feels so peaceful, sometimes I just go sit in his rocking chair alone to breath and think. He's super excited about having is bunk bed back together. Eventually Cal will move downstairs and be his roommate, but for right now Ollie has the place all to himself. Except for the cats, who like to sleep outside in his window well and watch him through the window.

Making New

When we listed our old house, we sold our entertainment center with the double book cases. It was huge and making the room look small, and we didn't know if we could use it in the new house anyway. So out it went. It served us well while we owned it, but it was time for it to move on.

In the new house we put the TV in the basement. The previous owners had left a black plastic-y cupboard thing, and we put the TV on that, but I knew it was very temporary. (I like to have my TV unintrusively behind doors. Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes.) And I waited for something to come along.

A friend from our old neighborhood was getting rid of this black  TV cabinet. She listed it on our old ward's Facebook page for $90. And I thought, "That's just the thing I need downstairs, but not for $90, not right now." A few weeks later, I saw another post from my friend, she had not sold her TV stand. She talked up it's excellent qualities, like how it was made almost entirely from real wood, and how it was sturdy and solid. And she dropped the price to $50. And I thought to myself, "Oh man. Real wood. That is exactly the kind of thing I'd love to have downstairs because not only does it have doors, but it's also sturdy. But not for $50, not right now." And I put it out of my mind. Weeks later, maybe even a month and a half later, I again saw a post from my friend, she couldn't believe she hadn't sold her TV cabinet; but they had started building a built-in entertainment center on their wall, and she no longer had a place to store this one while she waited for someone to buy it. She needed it gone asap. For free! Just please come take it off her hands. Boy did I jump on it!

I met Aaron at her house after work, and the three of us (so mostly Aaron) loaded this very solid and heavy piece (which was quite a bit bigger than it looked in the pictures) into the back of Aaron's truck and he drove it home.

And let me tell you, we had ourselves a time getting it out of the truck and up the garage steps, down the hall and into the kitchen, where the door to the basement is. And once we got it to that point, we tried every jerry-rigged scheme known to man-kind to try to fit it down the stairs...but no dice. The thing did not come apart....solid wood, right? So there was no making it smaller. And because of where our kitchen counter top is, and the narrowness of the stairs, and the slant of the ceiling above the stairs, there was NO WAY that thing was going down in one piece.

So we sawed it in half.

Yes.

We absolutely did.

Well, Aaron did. He sawed it horizontally, so the top cabinet piece came off from the bottom drawer piece.  Then we carried it down the stairs, and put it back together. My husband never ceases to amaze me with the ways he comes up with to problem solve. I absolutely 100% truly believe that if I can dream a thing up, he can think of a way to bring it about. And in almost 12 years of marriage he has never proved my theory wrong. He dazzles me.

So Aaron's job was to get the cabinet in place. The rest was up to me.

The cabinet was black, and that needed to change asap. Not only do I generally dislike black as a decorating option, but since it was in a room in the basement, the blackness of the cabinet seemed to create a black hole, sucking all the light out out of the space and making it feel oppressing.

Also, I have this beautiful forest mural on the opposite wall in that room, left by the previous owners. It's gorgeous and I love it, but how in the world do you decorate to match it?

I sat on it for a month, thinking it over. I could have sanded the whole thing down to start from scratch, but I didn't really want to. That takes SO much work. I know that several years down the road from now, we want to put in a fireplace on this wall and a built-in entertainment center of our own, so while I want this to look nice and be awesome for a few years, I didn't want to put loads and loads of effort and time into it, for the same reason I didn't want to spend a lot of money on it....because I know it's semi-temporary.

When my friend Wynter was refinishing her basement, she did her railings and a coffee table using chalk paint and antiquing wax. They looked awesome, and I knew that sometime I wanted to try it out, but at the time didn't have anything in mind, so I tucked the idea away in the back corners of my brain to rediscover later when I needed to. That time was now. I was walking through Wal-Mart one day, looking at art supplies for one of the kids' school things, and stumbled across the chalk paint on the shelf. I remembered Wynter's projects, and my black TV cabinet, and everything just came together in my mind like a lightening bolt. I bought some moss green chalk paint, and some antiquing wax on a whim, and rushed home to call Wynter and glean from her everything she knew about chalk painting projects. Haha!

It was quite the mental process that she had to talk me through step by step. The actual physical process of painting and antiquing was SUPER easy and fun. But the way the cabinet looks changes drastically from one step to the next, and I wasn't sure if I liked it or not (which is actually pretty typical of all projects I do) until I was all the way finished. But now I LOVE IT!

Moss green chalk paint without any antiquing. 

Chalked, and half antiqued. I was REALLY unsure of myself at this point. I actually ended up putting a clear coat of wax on over the antiquing wax to calm it down and blend it together a bit more, and I'm happy with the end result. 

I feel like the antiqued style goes really well with the forest mural. It sort of makes it feel like the TV cabinet belongs out in the woods. I'm envisioning pictures of fern leaves hanging on the walls, and maybe some stained-wood floating shelves and some houseplants to match.

Oh! And we found couches! I was so excited. We didn't have a basement family room in our old house, so when we moved here, I had no furniture to put down in this room. So the extras that I didn't know where to put, sort of ended up here.....the chase lounge that really belongs in the school room, and a rocking chair that goes up in Cal's room, an extra book case, and a rug from Aaron's mom's house that she was getting rid of. All of it is a super temporary hodge-podge. I've been searching KSL and the Facebook Classifieds for months and months to find just the right thing. Finally, right before Valentines Day, I saw a listing for a forest green leather couch and loveseat set in SLC for $100. It just so happened that when I found it, Aaron was scheduled to go to SLC to work at L3 for the day on a project. So he was able to swing by and pick up the set without making an extra trip. The reason the set was so cheap is because the sellers were moving to Germany and needed to get everything out of their apartment. Truth is they are bonded leather, so they won't last forever, but they ARE in really great shape. And the way I see it, for $100 bucks, my kids can pretty much be kids on them and I don't have to be furious about it. If they last us 4 years, that's $25 a year, and we can get something else at that point if we need to.  The only real challenge will be getting them back OUT of the basement; because like the TV cabinet, they were a beast to get down that narrow stair case.

Getting the couch down the stairs.

Here are some not that great pictures of the couch and loveseat to give you an idea.

How Easily Things Go Untold

Stewart Ross Lemmon

Stew Lemmon, I'd love to know why this picture was taken, and why my dad is all dressed up like an indian chief.

Tami Lemmon, Stew Lemmon, Kyle Lemmon

Krystal riding Roxie with Dad in the Hooper backyard. 

Stew and Krystal and Reuben the dog.

A Sunday afternoon, Krystal and Stew Lemmon

Many things have collided to inspire this post.

1- My Uncle Scott, my dad's older brother, died earlier this week. I didn't know Scott very well, he liked always to keep pretty much to himself. But he would email back and forth, and he always sent me a Christmas card, every year, even since I've been married. When I was in high school he used to come to all my softball games drinking his coffee, smoking a cigarette and wearing neon shorts so short that his cheeks hung out in the back. My teammates would always point and whisper and wonder who "that guy" was. But I was always so proud that he wanted to come watch me play. I knew he was there partially because he liked baseball, but mostly because he knew my dad never missed a game when he was alive, and coming in his place was Scott's way of doing what he could to support our family, to make sure I had someone at the games cheering me on. Scott didn't want a funeral, and he asked to be cremated. And while I respect his wishes for no one to "make a fuss", I would have liked the opportunity to celebrate his life, and get to know him a bit better. 

And it all just makes me think about how my dad's family is all silently slipping away, one by one, first Papa Lemmon, then my dad, then my Grandma Lemmon. Lee, my dad's oldest brother died a few years ago, now Scott....and let's be honest my dad's sisters aren't far behind. The oldest one is in her 80s.

This branch of the family tree has a complex and colorful history. And because of that it seems like the people who know the stories that are living are keeping them half covered up. Like they don't want to expose them because the younger generation might some how think less of them for being human.

I don't think anything I learned about my Grandma Lemmon could make me think less of her. She was one of my most favorite people on this planet. I know she had a hard life. I admire her for doing as well as she did, and for the love she showed to everyone around her along the way.

But I think knowing would help with understanding. Maybe we could finally understand why my three aunts dislike each other so much they won't even talk to each other. Maybe we'd understand why Grandma Lemmon asked not to be sealed to any of her 4 husbands. (And maybe some day we'll be able to figure out how it is that she ended up sealed to ALL four of them?) Maybe if I understood more of how my dad was raised, I could understand why he raised us the way he did.

2- My sister-in-law asked me for a sample of my dad's handwriting. So I've been leafing through his missionary journal, and that lead me to leafing through the binder  where I keep a printed copy of all the talks he gave when he was a high councilman. He shares a lot of his personal history and life experiences in his talks, so when he died, I printed out copies and made binders for me and my mom and my three brothers.

And as I'm reading the things that my dad wrote, again, I am struck by all the stories and things I barely know. The people he talks about are real people who I've met, and who mean something to me. But to my kids....their Papa Stew is just a story, and his parents and siblings are just a shadow of a story. They aren't real for my kids. And it makes me so sad. No matter what kind of stories I tell, or how many times I try to explain things....my step-dad is their "real" (real as in the one thy know in real life) grandpa. And my dad is just this person that they sometimes hear about, and know is my dad, but that knowledge is sort of hazy because they have a hard time wrapping their heads around death and remarriage and step-families.

I don't know how to make it be any different. But I do know that I don't want things to get lost. So, today I feel to put down some of the words of my father. I don't know all the answers about what kind of details fill in the gaping holes. I have so many questions. But I want what I do know to stay alive. And maybe somebody who has been looking at a bare family genealogy chart that isn't anything but names, will someday will read this and find pieces of answers at least, about real people who lived their lives the best they could and had stories to tell.

I want to start with my dad's own testimony. This comes off the first page in his mission journal:

"All of my life I have been a Rebel. I was born in the church but rebelled against it at an early age. I was never active and I just didn't believe it. I had the same questions that most boys have about life but I sought the answers in science not religion. In spite of my beliefs at that time I had a deep sense of destiny which drove me to find out who I was etc. It was not until my senior year in high school. I was put into Mike Steoger's seminary class. At first I tried to contend with him on points of doctrine but he, knowing my impassioned mind, would give me books to read and scriptures to study. Gradually I gained an intellectual testimony but not spiritual. He told me that until I prayed I would just stagnate where I was and couldn't progress. Praying was hard for me, I was "embarrassed". What finally motivated me was when Mike gave me the responsibility to teach the class the next day. I prayed for help so I wouldn't teach this class that I loved so much the wrong things. The help came and it was a start to a long, hard, road to gaining a testimony." -Stewart Ross Lemmon

Now, I want to continue with a little bit more of his life story. These pieces might be all over the place, but it's the best I can do with what I have.

"Perfect Love Castest Out Fear. Brothers and Sisters, I ask for your indulgence as I broach an uncomfortable subject. Fear. I am not speaking in the context of being "God-fearing". I'm talking about what makes us afraid. The fears that alter our behavior......My earliest memories of real fear are perhaps familiar to some of you too. I remember lying awake in my bed at night as a little boy and hearing a drunken father threaten my mother. I remember being abandoned by that father and fearing that my mother would abandon me too. We learn real fear real early.......1 John 4:18 says "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.".....What happens to our fear when love enters in? Along with the fearful times in my childhood, I also remember the times my mother visited my bedroom to assure me that, no matter what happened, she would always love me and never leave me. Because of that love, a frightened little boy was able to go back to sleep and find peace in a troubled world." 

This next one is long, so I scanned it instead of trying to retype all of it. Also, since it was several pages long, and I'm only wanting to focus on the family history part here, I took out all the bits where he was sharing other stories that aren't his, or where he was quoting scriptures or apostles. I know. That's all good stuff too, but right now I'm just wanting the family history portions.  This is my dad talking about my Grandma Lemmon's life.

This is from the same talk about covenants as the pieces above, but I skipped a big chunk, sorry if it doesn't flow.

The next part I'm going to share is a blip from a talk  on patriotism my dad gave in July as a high councilman. It's just a small story, some other day I'll post the whole talk, because it's really good. In this blip, my dad mentions his dad. I just wanted to make a note here that the "Dad" he is referring to is his adoptive father Earl Lemmon. Not his birth father Grover Thompson, the abusive drunk mentioned in the stories above. The "two sons" mentioned are Scott Lemmon and Tex Lemmon.

Maxine Harrison was her maiden name, but I knew her as Grandma Lemmon. 

Earl Scott Lemmon married Maxine when my dad was 4 and officially adopted my dad when my dad was around twelve. I know this man as Papa Lemmon. 

Krystal (me), Grandma Lemmon, Papa Lemmon, Jackson, and Stew Lemmon. I think this is at Jackson Hole, WY

Grandma Lemmon, Krystal, Kyle, and Papa Lemmon

Krystal and Papa Lemmon planting pine trees in the Hooper backyard 1988ish

One more from my dad's mission journal, and then I'm done for today. This is towards the end of his journal as he's getting ready to come home.

"I've been reflecting back on my mission trying to get some ammo for my report to the pres and home coming talk. It's funny, I feel more like a war corespondent than a warrior. The true "growth" I've experienced on my mission had been through analyzing the things that I experienced.  A simple 2 minute experience can lead to hours of contemplation and volumes of insights and lessons learned. In that sense then, the most valuable experiences of my mission have taken place in my head, enlightening my mind. I guess that's what a true spiritual experience is: spiritual/intellectual enlightenment rather than physical chills running up and down your back. Mission are important because they give experiences that act as a physical catalyst for spiritual enlightenment. Or maybe my mission just taught me how to use physical experiences to gain spiritual enlightenment. 

When we see something we don't really see it, we see light waves bouncing off of it."

Out of the Blue

So I made my blog private. Super annoying, right? Right! Ugh.

I've been blogging for nine years and I've always had a "public but unsearchable" privacy setting. I've always been fine with it.

Except last night I woke up in the middle of the night with the thought that I should make my blog private. Kind of out of the blue. Nothing has happened. There are no creepers that I know of.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But it matches the inclinations I'm having to draw inward. In the last week I've gone through all my Instagram and Facebook "friends" and pared the list down to only those that I actually associate with in real life. Sorry people I went to high school with and haven't seen or talked to since. Sorry acquaintances who used to be in my ward or neighborhood but one or both of us moved, and we haven't had a conversation since. Sorry people I used to play volleyball with, but don't anymore and that was the only thing we had in common. Sorry extended family members who I know I'm biologically related to but don't know if I could pick out of a crowd. Good-bye.

I'm down-sizing. I'm craving closeness and connection and realism. I don't really have a desire to be "out there" right now.

Glimpses

Science - We've been getting boxes from TinkerCrate this year, and they have been fun. The kids look forward to them each month. This month's box was making circuits to light up paper lanterns.

History - I always feel like History and Langue Arts overlap a ton at out house. For MLK day we had a poetry tea time where we watched the youtube video of Dr. King's entire "I have a dream" speech. Then we made hand print wreaths and pasted a quote on them to hang up in the school room.

Art - Ivan's art class doesn't start up again until February, so he's been working independently for the last several weeks. One of the things he made was this, which he calls "A Tree in Three" it is a tree, and he split it into three sections where he used acrylic paints on top, colored pencils in the middle, and oil pastels on bottom.

Math - My wonderful friend Wynter is working on writing a math curriculum. As she's been putting her webiste etc together she's come out with some really fun activities. One of those activities are these fun clocks that help you tell time, learn to count by fives, AND work on your five times tables.

Friday Fun - We've been meeting our homeschool group at the Springville Library on Friday afternoon to play games. It's been a good option for winter time. The kids can still see their friends, we moms can still see our friends, and no one has to be outside freezing to death.

Heading out on a Friday to play games with our home school buds at the library.

Language Arts - We're a little heavy on the langue arts at our house. Sometimes I think we could list just about everything we do under that category. :) We finished listening to Johnny Tremain. We've been doing copy work exercises from it all month, and having some awesome discussions. This middle grade reader is a bit slow at first, but by the end your heart is swelling with pride and love of country. James Otis's speech about "A man can stand up" tied in nicely with our study of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, and we talked about how what the colonists started clear back in 1776 is something we are still trying to fully realize and bring about today.

We also listened to The Red Pencil, but haven't started any work from it yet. Lincoln and Ivan have both read Finn Family Moonmintol, which is where our copy work will come from next.

Lincoln read the biography of Leland Melvin and completed a biography box style book report. As part of the report he made and flew a straw rocket. Ivan has been reading Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart.

Scripture Study - We begin our school days by singing a hymn, having a prayer, and reading a few verses from the Book of Mormon. This year we are attempting to scripture journal also, by using the "Box-A-Day" method. 

We take a piece of paper and fold it into 16 boxes. Each day, after we read, we draw a picture in one of the boxes about what we read, or something we learned, or thought was interesting. At the end of 16 days, when our paper is full, we get out a lined paper and write on it more in-depth about what we learned/thought was interesting/our testimony....basically anything that encompasses putting thoughts to paper about what we've been reading. Then we stick the lined paper, and the box paper back to back and laminate them together. Hopefully by the time we're done reading the Book of Mormon we'll have a fun little picture journal, and our thoughts about what we read, to go with. 

The first 3 pages of my scripture journal

Up close. I require that we write the verses we read for the day at the top of each box. Then I encourage the kid to either copy a portion of a verse  or to in some way write an explanation to go along with their picture. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

A box from Ivan's journal. I love  how well he conveys expressions, even in stick figures. 

This is the back side of one of Ivan's journals. I have them do this part "free-write style" which means I don't correct grammar or spelling. What I'm concerned with here is content, and narrative voice. I want them to feel safe expressing their deepest thoughts without fear that they will get all marked up with red pen. 

CO-OP Classes - Co-op is about to start up here again next week. I am signed up to teach two classes this semester, Animal Science to Ollie's age group, and Poetry (which is titled Wacky Words, so it sounds more fun and less intimidating) for the older kids class. I'm actually really excited for both these classes, but they will be a TON of work. Their are eight weeks of class. These are my class description write-ups. I did them by hand because my computer was being stupid. But, sometimes doesn't it just feel really good to put pencil to paper? It was a really enjoyable exercise for me.