Here's a poem to celebrate spring.
It's from my book, Wildlife Poems.
Perhaps you, or your children if you're a parent, carer, or teacher, might like to write a poem in the same style, or similar, keeping the pattern simple.
Anticipating
Eggs
are opening;
hives
are opening;
dens
are opening;
doors
are opening;
wings
are opening;
eyes
are opening;
beaks
are opening;
jaws
are opening:
spring
is opening.
Summer
is waiting.
From Wildlife Poems
More spring poems coming later.
Meanwhile, have fun with your own!
Parents and carers, you'll have your work cut out this week, keeping your children occupied and happy, I expect! But it's also an opportunity for fun, finding out, free thinking, family time and a whole lot more out-of-school experiences. Holidays offer great potential for nurturing, learning and development in all ways - including language.
Here are 3 ideas for home language fun. They can be played while wandering through a park, rambling through the countryside, relaxing on the beach, or sitting round the kitchen table.
1) How many F's for Flower?
Choose an item you can see and think up words to describe it that start with the same letter.
Here's an example:
Flower: fragrant, fresh, floaty, flame-shaped, fragile, floppy, frail, fluted, fire-bright, feathery.
What's the score?
2) What rhymes with...?
Choose a simple word, such as Tree. How many words can you think up that rhyme with it?
Examples: tea, free, pea, me, three, he, she, be, bee, key, agree, brie (cheese), knee.
Now make up a verse with those words.
3) Limericks
These little rhymes start with a rhyming couplet, and finish up with another line that rhymes with it, but in the middle there's a different, shorter rhyme - or a rhyme within the line.
Aim for simple rhymes, and start with 'There once was...' or 'There was...'
Here's an example:
There once was a boy called Sam,
Who loved to eat toast and jam.
But he didn't like cheese, or carrots or peas,
And he simply couldn't stand ham.
If this is too hard for your children, just try the first rhyming couplet together.
Now they can write out their lists and rhymes, decorate, and display!
Enjoy your half term!
Kate
Hi again, and happy half term if you're in the UK, or anywhere else currently enjoying a school break!
If you're a parent, this is an ideal opportunity to spur your children's reading development. Here are some suggestions. Pick and choose to suit your child's age, reading level, interests and opportunities:
1. Point out car number plates and prompt for their letters, or the sounds they make. Do they combine to make a funny-sounding word, or a real one? Do any of the letters match the initials of any family members?
2. Ask your child to read out information on packets, cans or bottles for you, on shopping expeditions or at home. You could ask for the ingredients, cooking instructions, serving suggestion, 'Best before' date, or specified flavour.
3. Going on holiday? Involve your child in map reading or checking road names, signposts or directions on your 'sat nav' system.
4. Pick up a free newspaper or 'What's on' and ask your child to check an item of information in it. (This could be anything from the headline to the weather forecast or TV listings for the day.) If not ready for this level of reading, help him work out one of the more child-appropriate headlines, or to spot a word or letter they've come across elsewhere.
5. Out and about in town? Play 'I spy' with a chosen letter or word. The word might be 'Menu', 'Danger', 'Open', 'Push', or 'Exit', for instance. For more able readers, check and discuss the menu contents as you pass, or look out for longer, more challenging words like 'Restauraunt', 'Pedestrians' or 'Information'.
6. Read a book, story or poem aloud to your child, sharing a word or two, or taking it in turns to read.
7. Read yourself! There's nothing like setting an example to encourage your children to do the same!
Tip - obvious, of course, but not always when one's trying to do eight things at once to a deadline: act natural, showing interest in the subject on your child's level; you're not their teacher (unless you're one of the rare exceptions!), and he doesn't want a lesson from anyone in his half term break - least of all from a parent!
Have good week!
KateMore @ poemsforfun.wordpress.com
My poetry workshops for October and November are full of sparks, spooks, thumps, zooms and dazzles!
My theme choices are Autumn Leaves (and don't groan: leaves are fascinating, fun and full of potential for imagination-flying - see below!), Wild Woods, Giants, Fireworks and Christmas Colours. I love them all; so do the children!
Take those leaves for starters: they're not just old, brown, dilapidated, slippery nuisances, blocking up our gutters and sending us tumbling - although there's plenty for a poem in all that too! They're colour wonders, fragility miracles, sky-decorators, dancers, acrobats, adventurers! In our workshops we may take one and sail with it, over forests and cities, over seas, deserts, jungles. A girl in one of my sessions sent hers to New York and got it driving a taxi (in her poem at least). As for those colours, growing richer by the week, kids bask in their imagery potential! The other day, a five-year-old added, as a little afterthought to a poem about a falling leaf, that it was 'as orange as a tiger in the jungle'.
As for giants - they get everywhere (particularly through school roofs and staffroom walls, I should warn you), with their colossal, crashing feet - heads literally in the clouds. Not that our giant poetry is all about destructive giants, or male ones either. Angelic, sunset-gliding female giants mingled with lonely, gentle giant lads in our poetry sessions at Clarendon Junior School, Wiltshire last week, along with some clumsy, butter-fingered characters that reminded me of myself, and one or two grizzly beasts from pre-historic times too, I should add, whose voices shook the school hall windows.
Wild Woods is another theme that speaks for itself, especially with Halloween round the corner - or behind that tree trunk. My bag of soft toy animals comes into its own here, spurring ideas and language for movements, sounds and atmosphere.
Fireworks is another favourite of mine - and the kids! It has everything: noise, colour,action, drama, mystery, patterns and shapes, hot fire, hot dogs, hot chocolate, and a shiver down your back from a faint owl hoot, perhaps.
My Christmas Colours theme involves everything from fairy lights to traffic lights, and is suitable for children of any or no religion. What does a town look like after dark, for instance?
Further details of my workshops are available on my other website:
http://poemsforfun.wordpress.com/workshops/
Kate
Kate Williams
Children's Poet & Workshop Leader
Email: katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com
Represented by The Poetry Society, Authors Abroad, Authors Aloud UK and Literature Wales.
Teachers may be interested to know that I'm currently taking bookings for poetry workshop days for children from Nursery to age 13 (Year 8) in England and Wales.
My summer theme choices are: Sea, Jungle and Mini-Beasts. Each offers infinite potential for creative thinking and writing, and as I prepare my workshop plans for the term ahead I'm growing ever more excited about the wonderful promise these themes hold in terms of ideas, language, imagery, poetic adventure, illustration, musical accompaniment, acting out, and who knows how much more!
The theme of Sea, for instance, offers up a wealth of popular topics from ship wrecks and pirate treasure to tempests and sea serpents, not forgetting the beauty of a sunlit sea, the fun of seaside splashes and, of course, the beach - another source of wonders and fun! And then there's the power of the sea and the plethora of associated concepts: its vastness, mystery, mood-swings, glory, presence...
Further details of my workshops can be found on my other website, poemsforfun.wordpress.com, Workshops page.
"I loved that, and I hate poetry!" a ten-year-old boy told me after a workshop of mine he'd attended in a Wiltshire primary school. I love them too!
Kate
I've put various new poems and rhymes on different pages here, and also on the pages of my other website, poemsorfun.wordpress.com, if you care to browse.
These include a newly published poem for children (and adults??) about a dragon - or at least, signs of - as well as a deliciously refreshing (at least, it is to me - that's why I wrote it) rhyme to celebrate the arrival of spring, also on my For kids page, and some frivolities on my Gardening and Humorous pages. Over on my other website, you'll find more of my poems: a mixed assortment for children, adult humorous, and adult thoughtful.
Any comments welcome!
Happy Easter break - if you're getting one,
Kate
Hooray, it's spring... well, April anyway. That's spring, isn't it? Used to be anyway. (I'm in the UK, by the way, so if you're the other side of the world this particular climate conundrum probably doesn't apply to you.)
Yes, the weeds are all up in my garden, the grass is starting to spring up again in all the wrong places, and the April showers are here... never left last year actually, so I'm hoping some new poem ideas will soon start springing up too, in my pen and eventually on these pages. Will let you know when.
Meanwhile, in case you're a teacher and may be interested, I might as well mention that I'm now preparing my summer term poetry workshop themes. These will include sparkling seasides, wild tempests, sea-bed secrets, and the odd - very odd, probably - sea monster. Jungles are also on my summer agenda, with petrifying prowls, growls and howls amid the twisty tangles below, and mad monkey mayhem in the towering treetops above - or whatever else my classes may wish to conjure up. The fascinating world of insects is also buzzing round my head, inside it, that is - hopefully not outside, though I have encountered the odd spider daring its way into our house recently, and no doubt some kids will be itching to freak me out with more of the things. True, spiders aren't actually insects, but my theme will cover 'mini-beasts' of all nasty, knobbly kinds, and beautiful ones too. Yes, delicate, transparent wings will be flitting before our eyes, and, hopefully, across some of our pages too, through silky blue skies and lush green foliage as we lead the way from one poetry style to another. So despite the ongoing murkiness of the weather, I'm already gearing up for summer, and if it doesn't show up, we'll magic it through our poetry, or rather, the children will. They never let me down!
Will keep you posted of latest poems and other updates meanwhile.
Happy Easter!
Kate
