Poetry

I started teaching the girls about poetic forms. We learned about different feet (iambic, dactylic, anapestic, etc.) and meters (trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, etc.). We used dots and slashes to show where the emphasis falls in a line, and letters to show rhyming schemes. We talked about some traditional forms, like sonnets, limericks, and haiku, and how poets use forms to work within a tradition. We had a lot of side discussions: about ordinal prefixes (mono, di, tri, etc.); syllables and how they're like "beats"; how forms can be used like rules in a game to make things more challenging; and how different forms are used to talk about different subjects (sonnets about love, limericks for humor, etc.). We came up with examples as we went (One of our better iambic monometers was "I HATE to CLEAN my ROOM"), and we analyzed some "real poetry" (i.e., They Might Be Giants songs) and figured out the meter and rhyming schemes they used. Finally, we wrote a little poetry ourselves. My idea is to have them write something in a different form every friday. This week we all did a haiku. Here's Emma's:

platypus Emma
sat in a tree eating a
cherry pie. oh my!

And Soren's:

halloween is great
I think I will be a witch
goblins are scary

Soren was challenged by getting the right number of syllables. What ended up working well for her was deciding what she wanted to say first, then thinking of different ways to say it to come up with the right number of syllables.