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.

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. 

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.

Winding Down Slowly

 Our yard is still blooming. I'm obsessed with it. I love to be outside. I check my garden several times a day to see if any green things have poked through yet. Spinach and peas, and one or two beats!

peas

spinach

Our school days seem to be getting shorter and shorter and a lot less structured. Eventually, it'll just settle in to one eternal round of P.E. and outside time. :) I'm ok with it. I like that our learning has a cycle. Sometimes it's very structured and orderly, sometimes it's interest based, and sometimes it's free time to be outside or create or experience things.

There are so many ways to create. I've found that when I feel the need to create I turn to language arts. I read out loud to the kids more. We write together. We cut pictures out of magazines and make collages. When I'm feeling creative, I like the kids to be creative too, and I might show it by being more lenient and counting their desire to build with K'Nex as "school time".

Ollie has discovered the pattern blocks. :) I love his concentration face. I love how he gasps in delight when he picks out which shape goes where. I love that he's starting to want to be apart of what the big kids are doing. The other day he came running into my room while I was filming a couple of book reviews with Ivan, and insisted that he had book reviews to do too. I let him climb up in the chair and have a turn. It was adorable. (Just ignore Ivan being a goober in the background.)

Ever since our Redwoods trip, Ivan has been painstakingly working on a poetry book of his own entitled River and Rain. I got to see the finished product the other day. He put a lot of his heart into it. And I am in love with it.

And this last page coming up, it's my favorite. When he was working on it, he came to me and asked, "Mom how do you spell 'thum'"? At first I was confused, but then he said, "you know like when you see one of thum." So, I told him 'them' and didn't realize what he was doing until he showed my the page all finished. He recognized that sometimes in speech we pronounce 'them' as 'thum', and he rhymed it with drum. A slant rhyme! And although he probably couldn't give it that name if you asked him, he's recognizing it in language and using it in writing. This makes my little literary heart beat a little faster. :) And, of course, the eyes drawn on to the word 'see' are fantastic too.

Ivan has also picked back up on his reading goal. He did two book reports for me this week.

Adelia only has a month and a half left of her Kindergarten class. And although it has been a really good thing, I am ready for it to wind down. Getting her to do homework every day is not my favorite thing. Especially when some of the material she is supposed to be memorizing isn't on my priority list for Kindergartners. But the school has been great for her, and I'm glad we enrolled her. I'll do my best to push through 'til the end. (Even if that means bribing her with an M&M for every line of math facts she completes.

I have really been trying to work on descriptive language with the kids in our writing time. We did a fun activity last week that was sort of a clash between an art project and a writing assignment. We drew our hands on a piece of paper and wrote the word 'flowers' in the middle on the palm. Then on each finger we wrote different way you could describe a flower. Color, kind, feel, size, smell, other. Then we gave each of those categories a section. In the section we thought up descriptive words for the category heads. I encouraged them to make it as colorful as possible.

Ivan's

Lincoln's