Poetry

The theme for this month’s Poppins Book Nook is poetry. We love poetry and experience it in a variety of ways all the time. One of the giggly girls enjoys pulling poetry books off the shelf and reading them just because. She also enjoys writing poetry and her gifts always include a poem written just for you.

I never really enjoyed poetry all that much but maybe that is because I don’t know how much poetry I experienced until I was in junior high and high school and having to read the “classical” style poetry. (That being said – I remember really liking Beowulf.) I don’t think that exposure at that level is bad but if you have had a good experience with it a number of times before that, I think you’ll enjoy it a whole lot more.

Our PBN selection just happened to line up perfectly with our Five In A Row selection: Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost with illustrations by Susan Jeffers. This lovely poem and accompanying illustrations opened up a whole lot of learning for the giggly girls.

One of the activities that we did in our FIAR study was to learn about poetry, rhyme, rhyme scheme, and more. We used a lovely set of posters that we have that give us examples of many different styles of poetry. We looked at them and read the example of the poem. Then we talked about what it was like: number of lines, rhyme, rhyme scheme, subject, fact or fiction, and whatever else the girls could notice about the poem. Then we read through some of the information about that poetry style. This is something we do a few times a year and it helps the girls’ awareness of the use of poetry that they come across in the bigger world.

We read through Stopping By Woods a number of times and the girls read it on their own, as well. J’s reading is coming along nicely and she was able to read a good bit of the poem without help. A good activity to do with a poem like this is to look closely at the rhyme scheme. It is actually a very interesting rhyme scheme. It is AABA in each stanza. The next stanza takes its A rhyme from the B of the previous stanza. It ties the poem together really nicely. We looked closely at that and the girls recreated it with counting crystals. poetry & pattern

We then experimented with various changes to the rhyme scheme: ABAB, ABAC, AABAB, ABACAD, etc. Each one was recreated with counting crystals to show comprehension. (Also – you get a math cross-curricular tie-in here.)

After that, the girls created their own rhyme scheme and wrote a poem to fit their rhyme scheme.

This was a fun day in our studies. If you are looking for further activities to do with Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening, check out our FIAR post about this book. There was so much to do with it!

And, as a final note, this will be our last post a co-hosts of the Poppins Book Nook. It has been a fun year but with all the changes that we naturally go through in a year, being a co-host of PBN is just not right for us for the next cycle of the PBN. It has been a fun year and the themes mixed things up for us some. Thanks Poppins Book Nook!