A Whiff of Pine, a Hint of Skunk and A Wave of Clouds – Poetry in the Speech Room

Last Monday I had a late meeting after work, and though I was eager to get home, I couldn’t help but stop, pull out my iPad and take a picture of the sky.

The scene ignited poetic sentiments in me and I thought it might do the same for others.  As you probably know, April is national poetry month. I decided to use the photo in a poetry project with my students. Since the majority of these kids are between the ages of five and seven, I started my project by introducing them to poetry. Some of them didn’t know the meaning of the word. A Whiff of Pine, a Hint of Skunk: a forest of poems, by Deborah Ruddell, illustrated by Joan Rankin, made a charming introduction. It captivated my students.

It’s easy to fit poetry into speech therapy sessions. For those working on articulation, I find alliterative poems that use the student’s target sounds. And for those needing help with phonemic awareness, rhyming words, and vocabulary, poems are ideal. One activity that builds listening skills was especially popular with the kids – I read from Deborah Ruddell’s book without showing the illustration and asked the students to try to figure out what animal I was reading about. I didn’t tell them the title before I read Biography of a Beaver:

            Bucktoothed Cleaver

            Tree Retriever

            Building Conceiver

            True Believer

            Waterproof Weaver

            Overachiever

            Roll-Up-Her-Sleever-

            Hooray for the _________

I left off the last word and the kindergarten students had no problem filling in “Beaver.” We had quite a vocabulary lesson with this poem as I read each line. I showed them the illustration after they’d guessed the animal and they were very pleased they’d figured it out on their own.

Another poem I used in this activity was The Night Owl. These sometimes-squirmy-kids listened attentively to the poem, which had become a riddle for them to solve.

            Somewhere in the forest

            he is practicing his hoot,

            but you’d swear that he’s rehearsing

            on a spooky-sounding flute-

            working on his timing

            and his quavery technique,

            patiently perfecting

            the position of his beak.

Once again, they guessed the animal. They leaned in close and poured over the illustration when I turned the book so they could see.

With a poetry lesson behind them, I showed my students the picture I’d taken of the clouds. They were intrigued. I asked them what they thought it looked like, how it made them feel, what it would sound like if it made a noise and let their imaginations take off. I jotted down their answers and comments, collecting them from different speech groups throughout the day. Then I typed them up, cut them apart and the following day, had students put them together to form a poem. Speech groups participated at different times throughout the week and a couple of my middle school students threw in their advice as well. Take a look at their creative composition:

Up in the sky there’s an ocean.

Whoosh

The waves are breaking.

Kshhhhhh,  kshhhhhh

They make me want to swim and splash

or learn to surf.

I wish I could surf in the sky.

I would surf to South America.

The waves could take you to Arizona.

They could take you anywhere.

If you saw the cloud-waves at sunset,

they’d look like they were made of sun.

If the sky can make waves,

maybe it can make beads.

Maybe they’ll fall

and I’ll catch the beads to make a necklace

and wear the sky around my neck.

I wish I could ride a ship on the cloud-ocean.

I’d ride those waves,

I’d ride them all the way to Mexico.

Ola Amigo!

But are they cloud-waves?

Or is it one long, long,

Dragon?