I'm a Poet and I Didn't Even Know It

Poetry - Tea

An idea from The Writer's Jungle by The Brave Writer. My younger child does NOT like to read and reading out loud can be excruciating for all involved. However, introducing the Poetry Tea has been miraculous. Both kids ask to do it and both kids participate with eagerness and smiles. Yes, there is something sweet to drink (no one really wants tea). There are Jelly Bellys or brownies, or something else sweet to go along with the sugary drink. So, yes, I understand that the motivation might be consuming mass amounts of sugar, but this is a small price to pay to see both kids running to the table to read poetry of all kinds out loud. 

We do have to make a lot of trips to the library, otherwise our poetry seems to be all Shel Silverstein!

Found Poetry

I cut out several words from magazines. Then I put them onto single sided laminating sheets, put colored paper behind it and recut them out to make them durable. I decided to color code the words. This is not part of regular found poetry, but I thought we might want to use the words for something else in the future, and I thought that maybe if the kids looked up the words, they might learn different types of words like adjective, adverb, article, noun, etc. Once the words were created, the kids could play with them, move them about, and make poetry on the spot!

Before I was done with the words, my daughter asked if she could make a poem. I reminded her that we had just gone on a trip to see the salmon run and spent the day at the river. Could she make a poem while thinking about that day?  Here is what she created:

A River

Frost arrived

All sleep

We play

One traveler's favorite voice

The only change my daughter made, was the apostrophe on the word travelers. She wanted to indicate that the children's playing voices were one traveler's favorite sound.

Then, a few days later, the kids and I watched a short video I took of the salmon attempting to jump up the large waterfall. We watched in silence, while we all thought about the sounds, visions, feelings and memories of that day. Then we all dove into the pile of words and picked out what we were thinking about. I asked for a set of three lines from each of us. My daughter gave four. Then we put them into an order that we felt made sense. Here is our group poem:

Wish for a River

natural adventure

open exploration

and great kids

launch area

electric bounce

wet, fresh season

happiness, warm, good

uncommon, extreme, and charming

all unique

we wish for a river 

I love that we were able to make a poem within 5 minutes without fear or hesitation. We had fun. We worked alone and together. The colored words looked pretty. We ended up with a nice poem.

Plants and Beyond

Learning all about plants:

We just completed our latest unit on plants. After reading and researching about photosynthesis, chlorophyl, and root systems, we dived into a few projects. We tried to germinate an avocado pit (once with a conventional pit and once with an organic pit, both faile

d) as well as a potato (failing now). I'm not sure why they aren't working, other than I do *not* have a green thumb. We followed directions, but for whatever reason (maybe it's winter and we don't have enough sunlight) they did not sprout.

We did get to explore a local store (3 miles from home) that we've never been to before and found it to be a fabulous, locally owned store. There, we purchased seeds and grew some wheat grass and cress (pictured in a heart formation) which worked great in less than a week. We had fun sketching them each day as there was a lot of rapid growth to keep us interested.

At the end of our unit, we made Japanese gardens and wrote Haikus to display with them.

Daughter's garden and haiku (could not convince her it was not a zen garden):

"A Zen Garden"

Here's a zen garden

Zen gardens are beautiful

I made mine today

Son's garden and haiku

"My Seeds"

Seed grow in the soil

They need water and sunlight

They become flowers