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.

I Wrote a Poem

Because it's still snowing and I want to cry; instead I wrote a poem using the magnetic poetry kit I bought myself for my birthday. I like to think of magnetic poetry as a creative challenge. You have an idea you want to convey, but you only have a very limited pool of words from which you can use so you have to get creative. You have to stretch the meanings of words; rely on their connotation, or their juxtaposition rather than their definition alone. It's fun. :) I've had this kit up on the fridge for a few days now, and I'm not the only one enjoying it. My kids have been loving it too. And hey, we can call it free-writing, right?

So here's my poem, just pretend there isn't an 's' on the end of 'throws' and that there IS an 'of' between 'the roof' and 'my house'.

Magnetic Poetry on a Snowy Day by Krystal Swan

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. :)

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.