From My Pocket to Theirs - Year 2

Poem in Your Pocket Day falls during our Spring Break this year.  I couldn’t let the day, April 18^th, slip by without bringing it to the attention of my students, so we started celebrating a bit early. I brought out the “pocket” I created last year and my students helped fill it with poems.

Yesterday, they emptied the pocket and shared poems with classmates. They carried them in their pockets as they left school on Friday and who knows, they may have them in their pockets again on the eighteenth.

When I looked for poems to share with the students, I found some fabulous ones in the book, National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry: 200 Poems with Photographs That Squeak, Soar, and Roar!

J. Patrick Lewis, U.S. Children’s Poet Laureate, edited this book. I’m grateful to our school librarian, Allison Brown, who loaned me her personal copy. From Jack Prelutsky to Emily Dickinson, there is a poet and poem for every taste. The focus on animals appealed to my students, especially with the accompanying photographs - they were spectacular! What child wouldn’t love a photograph and poem about a piranha or a panther? There is even a poem by one of my favorite poets from the past – Christina Georgina Rossetti.

HURT NO LIVING THING

Hurt no living thing: 


Ladybird, nor butterfly, 


Nor moth with dusty wing, 


Nor cricket chirping cheerily, 


Nor grasshopper so light of leap, 


Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat, 


Nor harmless worms that creep.

The kids were enthusiastic about our pocket activity and loved claiming a poem as their special one for the coming week. They left inspired. And who knows what poetry may come from these students in years ahead. I’m hopeful, on some future “Poem in Your Pocket Day,” I’ll be carrying one of their creations.

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?

New Life, New Stories: My First Day by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page

Easter has been on my mind this week and it has been on the minds of my students as well. They love talking about their plans. Skyler informed me that she is going to feed her fish, Roxie and Goldie, special Easter food. She plans to hide it, so her fish can hunt for the special treat. Olivya’s Dogs are going to get Easter eggs. She painted them at home – blue and green for Quest and pink and purple for Roxy. Olivya is going to hide the eggs for her dogs but her cat Luna will just get cat food. She scratches.

Not all kids celebrate Easter, so I steered the conversation away from the subject during many of my speech sessions and for my language groups, I read a book about new life in the animal kingdom: My First Day, by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page. 

It begins with a question,

“What did you do on your first day – the day you were born?”  

A kiwi starts off with his answer.

“On my first day, I spent hours kicking my way out of my egg. As soon as I hatched, I was ready to take care of myself.”

This charming book introduced wood ducks, sea otters, muntjacs and megapodes. I had never heard of some of the animals in the story, nor had my students. All the creatures fascinated the kids, but they were amazed when I read about Darwin’s frog.

“On my first day, I hopped out of my father’s mouth. When I was a tadpole, he kept me safe in a special pouch in this throat. But once I became a frog, it was time to be on my own.”

My students weren’t the only ones to gather new information when we read this story; many of the animal facts were new to me. At the back of the book the author provided more detailed information about the animals and their habitats.  That inspired my students to further research and so we used the Internet on my iPad and found some photographs of the animals.

All this talk of animals reminded Noah of his farm and his pig. He told us the pig made a huge nest of hay, just like a chicken nest, only bigger. Noah figures his pig learned the technique from the chickens because they live together. Nests brought the conversation back to eggs and that brought us back to Easter. His chickens, it seems, lay extra eggs on the holiday. I haven’t been to Noah’s house so I can’t say for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. After all, Easter is a time full of new life and new hope. That hope obviously extends to Noah’s chicken yard.

Infinity and Me – Kids Grapple with the Mind-Boggling

This week I read Infinity and Me by Kate Hosford to a few speech groups. It is beautifully illustrated by Gabi Swiatkowska. 

 

At first I was hesitant to read it to the kindergarteners. I thought they might not be ready for such an abstract concept but I needn’t have worried. Before reading, I asked the kids if they knew what “infinity” meant.  They didn’t. But by the end of the book, they had a pretty good idea.

The story begins,

“The night I got my new red shoes, I couldn’t wait to wear them to school. I was too excited to sleep, so I went outside and sat on the lawn. When I looked up, I shivered. The sky seemed so huge and cold.

How many stars were in the sky? A million? A billion? Maybe the number was as big as infinity.”

Uma, the contemplative child with the new red shoes, grappled with this concept and looked for enlightenment by asking her friends, grandmother, and teachers how they imagined infinity. Her friend Charlie told her infinity is “a giant number that keeps growing bigger and bigger forever.” After hearing from the others, Uma realized something. “It was hard to talk about infinity without talking about ‘forever.’” She started to wonder what she’d like to do forever and came up with a lot of possibilities like having recess forever, staying eight years old forever, or licking an ice-cream cone forever. My students got rather excited about some of those possibilities and added a few of their own.

When I asked the kids what they thought about infinity, Liam said, “If you ate infinity potatoes, you would get bigger and bigger forever.”

Enrique said, “Infinity minutes is a long, long, long, long, long time.”

Joden wanted to know, “What’s infinity plus infinity?” (I’ll have to consult a mathematician on that one.)  

Zayd asked, “Does Googol come before infinity?” And to think I was worried about introducing this complex concept to my students!

Toward the end of the story, when Uma spoke of her grandmother she said,

            “Right then I knew – my love for her was as big as . . .”

I didn’t need to finish the sentence. The kids finished it for me.

Afterward, Liam said, “Do you know how big LOVE is? It’s as big as this.” He spread his arms out in front of him, edging them wider and wider, until he reached around his back and clasped his hands together, leaving all of infinity outside his circled body, snug in a cocoon of unending love. Liam has great insight for a five-year-old. Actually, I’d say he has great insight for one of any age. He is beginning to grasp the concept of infinity and something more besides.