Poetry

[Mom2OandE]

What do you do for Poetry? Do you use a curricullum? Do you use it as a read aloud and discuss it or journal it? Do you use it for copywork?

 

Just curious. Trying to decide how I want to approach poetry. Thanks.

[MiztrezzLyn]

My son and I read poetry every day during his K year. I read from When We Were Young and Now We are Six and he read Talking Like the Rain.

 

For first grade and now 2nd grade, I've moved it to Fridays. He reads from The Random House Book of Poetry for Children and I read from Read-Aloud Poems for Young People.

 

We just enjoy it and read to each other, we'll talk about them a little bit if something particular strikes us but its really just to enjoy reading it together. My soon to be 4 year old has joined us this week and reads from Surprises. Its just too dang cute :)

 

Anyway, that's what we do :)

[Mandy in TN]

My son and I read poetry every day during his K year. I read from When We Were Young and Now We are Six and he read Talking Like the Rain.

 

For first grade and now 2nd grade, I've moved it to Fridays. He reads from The Random House Book of Poetry for Children and I read from Read-Aloud Poems for Young People.

 

We just enjoy it and read to each other, we'll talk about them a little bit if something particular strikes us but its really just to enjoy reading it together. My soon to be 4 year old has joined us this week and reads from Surprises. Its just too dang cute :)

 

Anyway, that's what we do :)

:iagree: The Random House Book of Poetry for Children This is also the book that I use.

 

Mandy

[Mandy in TN]

I was going to try IEW's Poetry Memorization this coming year, but decided against it. Instead this year we are going to focus on one poets at a time. We do memorize poetry.

 

For the littlest learners I like Mother Goose and the board book Eloise Wilken's Poems to Read to the Very Young. I like the Ambleside Yr1 free online poetry, The Random House Book of Poetry for Children and Grass Sandals: The Travels of Basho for the early grades. I like Classic Poetry: An Illustrated Collection and All the Small Poems for middle grades. Later in middle school/ early high school I like Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle. These poetry books were used by both my big boys and the little guy has started on them. These are some of the favorites from my shelf.

 

My oldest went on to use the rhetoric stage poetry from The Harp and the Laurel Wreath. He didn't complain, but it wasn't fabulous. He really enjoyed Edgar Allan Poe. He also used Walch's Toolbook: Poetry and Prose and that went well as far as teaching elements of poetry. My middle ds who isn't much interested in poetry has read several of the Poetry for Young People books from the library. It is a good series, but I haven't purchased them. Somewhere in there both my big boys also did The Grammar of Poetry to learn poetry fundamentals. I will probably use this one with my little guy at some point.

HTH-

Mandy

[2_girls_mommy]

Most of the time we just read. Occasionally we memorize. Once a year they both memorize a sonnet for sure. And I have them memorize one or two others a year too. Sometimes SOTW will assign a memory project or mention a type of poetry or have a project about a poem from the time period being studied. Sometimes they have the child write something similar (like when we learned about Haikus) and we will do those everytime. Sometimes one just makes sense (like when dd was six, I had her learn When I Was Six) Sometimes I let them pick from What Your X Grader Needs to Know.

 

Once in awhile we will do a poetry lesson from What Your X Grader Needs to Know online lesson plans.

 

But mainly we just read them.

[Walking-Iris]

So far I have just read a few poems each day. Sometimes I try to stick with a certain poet so they get familiar with that poet's style. We'v ememorized a few and used lines from some as copywork (for fun).

 

I've been thinking about getting the Bravewriter poetry pdf and checking out the book Rose Where Did You Get That Red?

 

There's some poetry lessons in Creative Writer that Peace Hill Press has out, but I'm saving that book until they are older.

 

My focus so far has just been in reading poetry.

[EducationX2]

We also enjoyed The Random House Book of Poetry for Children. It was very enjoyable!

 

How we do poetry around here... well. It's a mixture. :D

 

We just started IEW's poetry memorization. She's on the third poem now, and really loving it. It takes us basically no time (seriously, 5, 10 minutes a day, if that) but it is worth it if for nothing other than the accomplishment she feels when reciting a poem. Right now she recites for me and her grandmother and I make sure that she has proper posture, proper diction, she always says the title and author and really *recites* the poem, not just says it, with good rhythm and flow. Very enjoyable for both of us. We've been going through them line by line to make sure she understands the vocabulary and meaning. The poems are quite simple now, but I want to develop the habit for the later poems when there will be new words and such. (And even in these simpler poems, there are sometimes phrasings that don't quite make sense- I needed to explain what exactly "Celery raw, develops the jaw" meant :tongue_smilie:) We also use these poems for additional copywork.

 

We also read quite a bit of poetry. We read The Random House book. Now we are reading through Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends (for the second time actually, but she was only 2 the first time.) We read anywhere from 3-10 poems a day, usually at bedtime. Mostly I read to her, although lately she has taken to reading one or two of them to me. For these poems, I don't bother to explain anything extra unless she asks, and we don't use these for copywork. Again, it is a really quick and easy exposure to poetry. Along with our bedtime read along novel, we also always have a book of poetry going, either an anthology or a specific poet's works.

 

:bigear: On this thread for more ideas. I'd like to do a little more, but I don't think we have time. We'll probably stick with what we are doing for now.

[jar7709]

We do Bravewriter-esque tuesday teatime poetry reading sessions, except we eat ice cream. :001_smile: It is one of the highlights of our week. We take turns picking poems to read out of books from our poetry shelf, pointing out things we like about them. Books on the shelf are pretty varied and include some of the poetry collections PPs mentioned as well as titles by Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, Joyce Sidman, etc. The kids both learned a lot about differences between different types of poems from Janeczko's "A Kick in the Head". We don't go out of our way to memorize, but some favorites have been near-memorized by frequent repetition anyway. We don't journal or copywork them, our focus with poetry is enjoying language and meaning. Both kids have been known to spontaneously make a poem which they then dictate to me and I write into their writing notebooks we use for everything. I don't want to turn poetry into a chore...maybe when they become more fluent writers we'll experiment with freewriting poetry, we'll see.

[Mystie]

We've been doing poetry in a very relaxed way for 4 or 5 years now. A Child's Garden of Verses illustrated by Tasha Tudor is one of my favorites, and my sons particularly like narrative poems. T.S. Elliot's Book of Practical Cats is also very fun.

 

I wrote a guest post in April on easy ways to add poetry in the homeschool.

 

It was actually a short poem that an older homeschool mom told me years ago that helps me remember that just adding little bits here and there "counts":

 

Little drops of water,

little grains of sand,

make the mighty ocean

and the beauteous land.

 

And the little moments,

humble though they may be,

make the mighty ages

of eternity.

[AngelaNYC]

What do you do for Poetry? Do you use a curricullum? Do you use it as a read aloud and discuss it or journal it? Do you use it for copywork?

 

Just curious. Trying to decide how I want to approach poetry. Thanks.

 

We study 1 or 2 poets every 12 weeks. The poems are readalouds or ds and I alternate verses. We'll usually cover 1 or 2 poems a week. I love using them for copywork (usually only 2 lines), typing them out, and I'd like to try doing some memorization this year. I either print them out individually or read them from one of my anthology books.

[helena]

I've cut and pasted my answer from an old thread on poetry. :001_smile:

 

 

 

Well... for the record, we've been doing poetry study for 6 years, and I'm still not sure what I'm doing.

 

Every year I expect to find a more academic proper way to teach it, but I can't seem to make it happen. What we have here is a bulletin board (at eye level) dedicated to poetry. Once a month I post a poem to be put to memory (along with the printed poem is a photo of the poet and his/her name in bold type and other relevant tidbits printed off the internet). The kids spend a few minutes everyday practicing on their own, at the end of the month they recite from memory.

 

We've done many variations over the years. We've done our final recitals outside with tea on our homemade stage, I've had them read poetry books and choose a second poem for recitation (great way to make sure some of these lovely poetry books get read in their entirety). I always look for interesting readings on youtube like these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3lqF...6&feature=plcp and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUuZBXNw0O8. Every year I do it a little different. This coming year's theme is "simplify". In fact that is my theme for all subjects this year. (I'm really looking forward to it. ) We will only do one poem per month and recite here at our table. They will be using poems from previous years as copywork for Spencerian cursive.

 

Poetry has come up in other language arts work over the years, so they've learned a bit about the mechanics. I'm sure eventually I'll do some kind of formal poetry study. In the meantime they've become very familiar with many poems and poets. They know their faces, some of their stories, their styles... and best of all they quote poems at random moments in life (Callooh Callay!)

 

Today I cleaned out our poetry shelf (I collect vintage poetry books), and I put all our old printed poems in a nice fat pile. I'm surprised how many there are.

 

There's a photo of the bulletin board here in an old post: http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forum...d.php?t=252521

 

hth

:001_smile: