April is always National Poetry Month. And April 29th is 2010 Poem in Your Pocket Day. Will you be celebrating? Or  maybe you will make some plans for regularly incorporating poetry into your homeschool routine?

We probably won’t wait until April 29th, but I’ve decided to use the poem If We Must Die by Claude McKay as a tie-in to our WW2 studies. Supposedly American and British soldiers were given copies of this poem to put in their pockets for inspiration. It’s a pretty grim poem, but I guess that soldiers need such sort of strong talk to motivate themselves.

Here is the original Poem in Your Pocket verse by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers:

Keep a Poem in Your Pocket

Keep a poem in your pocket
and a picture in your head
and you’ll never feel lonely at night when you’re in bed.

The little poem will sing to you
the little picture bring to you
a dozen dreams to dance to you
at night when you’re in bed.

So–
Keep a picture in your pocket
and a poem in your head
and you’ll never be lonely at night when you’re in bed.

Print poems for your pocket at Poets.org or Homeschool Creations.  Or better yet, copy your own favorite poem. Here is a half sheet poetry page from Scholastic. And here is an accordion book template I created. (Click the image to download.)

If you want to read more about children and poetry, start with this wonderful article, Can Children’s Poetry Matter? by J. Patrick Lewis (hat tip to Farmschool who guest posted on HSBA Post).  More inspiration can be found in the interview of Michael Rosen, the UK Children’s Laureate, at Video Jug . He answers the questions:

• What’s the best way to introduce kids to poetry?
• What are the benefits of getting your child into poetry?
• Do humans have an instinct for poetry?

Like most things, poetry is an acquired taste. I am so glad that I started very early to introduce poetry to Sprite. We started with the Random House Book of  Poetry for Children. It has lasted us several years, even with reading one poem each school day. Soon we’ll be moving on to using Classic Poems to Read Aloud in which the poems are longer and more challenging but still appropriate for children.

Related posts:

1. Poetry Mobile
2. Poetry in our Charlotte Mason Homeschool
3. Math Poetry

Book reports get a bad reputation which I think is unfounded. Book reports are a wonderful way to integrate writing into your curriculum, especially if the book is historical fiction. You can also think of a book report as baby steps towards  literary analysis which will certainly be required of your students in high school and in college.

Bud, Not Buddy is a recent read aloud in our study of the Great Depression. (It is not on the Winter Promise list; I added it in.) I thought that since it was such a great novel, since it tied in so well to our history lessons, and since we both enjoyed it together,  it would be a perfect choice for Sprite’s first official book report.

At the recommendation of Kris, I downloaded the Weekly Reader title Writing a Great Book Report from Currclick. It was well worth the $5 I spent. (Although I love physical books, it’s so convenient to download today and use tomorrow. I also like that I can reprint another copy of the pages for use a second or third time.)

It turned out to be a great step by step introduction to the elements of fiction –  character, setting, and plot only –and a guide for writing a book report. Sprite really enjoyed working through the pages as she made notes about her novel.

[Maybe it's because we use so few worksheets that when I give her something like this she thinks it is quite enjoyable. Or maybe it's her love of writing in general. I can't explain it.]

The workbook gives the student a chance to prewrite about the characters and later write full sentences or paragraphs about them. The same is true for plot and then a personal evaluation of the book. Once the workbook is completed, you simply merge the paragraphs together to form an essay. Sprite typed up her draft and I worked with her to make edits.  The  revisions were a breeze to make in electronic format, and she agreed that the time invested in typing it was worth it in the long run.

Then we worked through some of the elements of fiction more formally with Sprite making a minibook of cards on a metal ring. I used our Write Source 2000 as a reference in teaching her these terms.

I made some elements of fiction printables to share with you. There is a poster file and a banners file as individual downloads, but the SET is the whole kit and caboodle with notebooking pages, notetaking pages, minibooks or flashcards, as well as both the poster and the banners. These are in A4 paper format. (I’m sorry to my American friends using 8 1/2 by 11 paper, but I made these for our own use and have shared them here for you too.  We use A4 paper in China. It’s taller and skinnier than your paper. But you can still print them on your shorter, fatter paper. The margins may simply be a little strange.)

I’ve already given her a second book report project assignment that includes more artistically creative options. It should take about three weeks to complete, and I’ll be sure to share that online too.

Do you use book reports with your children? At what age did you start? (Remember that Sprite is finishing 5th grade.)

Have you seen HOTM’s latest magazine? The March 2010 Edition is entitled Focus on Reading. There is a long list of quality entries, dealing with all aspects of teaching reading.

And don’t forget to go on to the next page of articles.

I contributed two articles myself:
Vocabulary in Your Read Aloud Books
and
How to Painlessly Add More Books to Your Reading Schedule.

Poetry Mobile Front

Let’s just start with the grand finale! As a recap of all we’d learned over several weeks of poetry study, Sprite made a poetic devices mobile. This is an idea we adapted from a lesson in Learning Language Arts Through Literature.

At the top is the object Sprite chose to describe — her cat Maxie. Hanging down from Maxie are various examples of poetic language. She had the clever idea of using cat shapes from Cat Coloring Pages to write her poetic devices on. (Just print them 2 per page for a smaller size.)

Poetry Mobile Back

You can see that one side has the type of figurative language and the other side has her example.

Maxie goes “grrrrr” at strangers.  / Onomotopeia

Maxie has the minimum skills to be a cat.  /  Pun

We used some lessons from LLATL to study poetry, but the bulk of our material was something I wrote myself. That unit study for poetry is available at Homeschool Share, and even though it’s been over there for a long time, we only recently completed it ourselves.

It is based on The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (click to read a full review) and goes through several poetic devices such as personification, alliteration, imagery, etc.

Here are Sprite’s use of personification and her notes on the same topic.

Here are photos of two of the free notebooking pages you can download over at Homeschool Share. The graphics are especially designed to match the poems to be copied.

Want more poetry links?

I’ve got a lens about poetry in homeschool.

And for more creative writing ideas, including poetic language, visit WordSmithery over at SmallWorld.

Related posts:

1. National Poetry Month
2. Poetry in our Charlotte Mason Homeschool
3. Math Poetry

Inside our Reference Organizer, you may have noticed the I made a reference minibook of figures of speech or poetic devices. I used a PDF printable I found at Katie Jensen’s Classroom Posters page. It was a very useful reference as we went through our poetry study. And we pull it out every now and then when we come across a poetic device in our reading.

Look for the Literary Devices Posters. (It’s a great site for free printables, do some peeping over there; you’re sure to find something you like.) To make a minibook, simply change your print settings to print four per page. I hole punched the corner and used a paper fastener to keep it all together. It would work really well on a ring too.

Responding versus proofreading in the writing process is an important distinction to make.

Proofreading is done right before you create your final draft. It’s when you look for all those pesky errors like run-on sentences and misspelled words.

Responding, on the other hand, is done earlier during the revision stage.  The emphasis is on organization, concepts, and transitions, in other words, the ideas presented in the writing.

After all, isn’t THAT why we write — to express ideas?

Not a few times in China, I have encountered a situation that is applicable to the writing process.

(I make plenty of mistakes with my childish Mandarin, but I can get my basic meaning across most of the time.  This story is not to brag, but to illustrate a point.)

Imagine me, blonde hair and all, doing my best to communicate with someone in her language (my second language). I am expressing myself clearly, choosing appropriate words, nailing the tones, and using correct grammar. I speak on for a couple of minutes, sharing my heart with a new acquaintance, probably answering a question she asked me. At a natural pause, that person looks at me in amazement and says, “You can speak Chinese really well!” After a brief thanks, I continue on with my story. Next the person interrupts me to say, “How did you learn Chinese? Did you learn it in America or in China?”

How am I feeling at that point? Am I flattered that this new friend is impressed by my Chinese?

No, actually not at all.

In fact, I’m irritated and saddened that she can’t see past my foreignness and my language to listen to what I’m saying. My meaning is far more important than the package – in this case the Mandarin that’s coming out of this blue eyed head (as shocking as that is). I can tell you that it’s a terribly frustrating and even demeaning feeling.

So there’s my main point — meaning is far more important than the package.

My analogy breaks down in lots of ways, but today as I was reading the The #8 Stumbling Block to Writing over at The Write Shop, this illustration hit me with real clarity.

When Sprite pours out her heart in a writing assignment and hands her draft over to me to look at, I have a choice. I can focus on the package – the spelling, the punctuation, the crazy handwriting — or the meaning. When I point out that she spelled TRYED wrong three times, she probably feels the same frustration I feel when that acquaintance can’t see past my blue eyes to my meaning.

This is exactly why I try my hardest to keep my mouth shut about all of the “cosmetic” issues with her writing and first talk about the meanings:

• Your details fit your main idea perfectly!
• I love how you told the funny story to illustrate your point.
• This second point needs more meat. It much weaker than the other two points.
• These words are perfect to express what you’re trying to say.
• These transition words make your thinking crystal clear.
• I don’t see how this detail fits your main idea.
• Why did you arrange the facts in this order?

I’m not talking about praise versus criticism. Did you notice that some of these responses were more negative than others? But I addressed her meaning, and that feels good to a child — to any writer, really — to be taken as a valid spokesman.

Later once the meat of the meaning has been sorted out, then we can move on to proofreading. That’s when I nit-pick about the spellings and missing commas. By that point, I’ve really tried to understand what Sprite is saying. And then we can focus on the grammar and mechanics.

So if my communication story makes you feel sympathy for me, transfer that feeling onto your young writer. Consider his or her frustration when you criticize his handwriting and sloppy margins instead of looking at the expression of his concepts. There is certainly a time for talking about capitalized letters and “change the y to i and add -ed.” But make sure you’re doing that at the right time in the writing process.

If you are working with your children on writing (aren’t we all?), then I do suggest you pop over to The Write Shop’s blog and read some of the series of 10 Stumbling Blocks to Writing. Maybe you’ll get some insights as I did. And besides, they’re having a contest for $25 worth of products.

Related posts:

1. Sentence Writing
2. Mini-books for Writing

Although Sprite can write a nice paragraph already, I’ve been working in depth with her on writing good sentences. She has the cognitive ability to analyze the grammar of sentences, and I’m introducing the terms simple, compound, and complex. But those terms are not my focus. Instead, I want her to realize the various ways sentences can be crafted. It’s far more important that someone can write a good sentence than label that sentence.

My long term goal is that by eighth grade she can write a full five paragraph essay on demand. So step one is sentence writing. Of course, the reality is that as we’re working on paragraphs and even on essays, our study of sentences will continue. Writing is very cyclical (a lot like living math, actually).

Here are my current goals for each sentence she writes:

• begins with a capital letter
• ends with punctuation
• uses punctuation correctly within the sentence
• no run-ons or fragments

And on top of that, I want her to use varied types of sentences in her writing, including compound sentences and complex sentences.

On my freebies page you can find the resources I created to help Sprite learn the different sentence patterns. After an introduction to the sentence patterns, you can make up lots of exercises for practicing them. Here are some examples.

Teaching sentence patterns

1. Have your child label the pattern of selected sentences. (It’s best when these sentences are taken from a book you are reading.)
2. Hand a book to your child and have her locate examples of each sentence pattern.
3. Have your child create her own sentences for each pattern. (If a boost is needed, give a list of words such as vocabulary or spelling words to use in the sentences.)
4. Have your child rework existing sentences, using all of the different sentence patterns.

It’s all a very living approach to language. I use workbook exercises sparingly in favor of real living texts and doing our own writing. That means that we can spend less on language arts curriculum and more on real books.

I did buy Evan Moor’s Writing Fabulous Sentences and Paragraphs. It’s not necessary, but Sprite enjoys workbooks. (That’s probably because we use them so rarely.) Anyway, sometimes it’s nice to have an assignment to just hand over with the directions to “do page 26.” The front of the book has some sentence exercises that complement my sentence patterns material well. But then we take it farther, of course.

I use the “little, often” approach with writing. We do short (little), daily (often)  mini lessons until the concept seems well internalized. Besides the mini lesson, I try to point out interesting sentence patterns (or errors!) in the curriculum we use so that Sprite can see that these sentence forms are not an isolated skill but an integrated part of our entire language.

Related posts:

1. Mini-books for Writing
2. Teaching Writing — The Package Versus the Meaning

We all know the power of repetition in learning spelling. That’s why our teachers made us copy our spelling words ten times each. Unfortunately repetition can also become mindless as your brain disengages from the task. So the balance when teaching spelling is to give our children the power of repetition without the boredom that often accompanies it.

Read the rest of my latest article at Heart of the Matter.

Related posts:

1. Spelling Creatively

I’ve started using reading journals with Sprite. It’s a way to encourage her independent interactions the novels she’s reading.

Lincoln Novel, Bookmark, and Journal

I printed and laminated these bookmarks and made a simple single fold book for her Abraham Lincoln biography (shape template).

Jericho's Journey and Reading Journal

Here’s another one for Jericho’s Journey with a covered wagon image. She’s loving this book, by the way.

Of course, she already interacts with text but generally in discussions with me when I tend to pull things out of her. As part of moving toward more independent learning, I’d like her to do the thinking on her own and write down those thoughts.

Reading Response Prompts Minioffice

She can also use the journal to make notes about the plot or about new vocabulary words which may be helpful for notebooking pages or a writing assignment. Sprite has been excited to know that she can even mark in her novels and school books to underline key ideas.

She does both narrations and reactions in her journal.

I’ve not given this reading response minioffice to Sprite yet. I hope to ease her into reading journals with the handful of focused questions on the bookmark. The minioffice has lots of options, and I don’t want to overwhelm her.  This is what the inside looks like, and you can get the  cut-outs here.

reading response minioffice

direct link to letter size cut outs

& direct link to A4 size cut outs

reading response minioffice

You can see all my reading journal bookmarks at Tagfoot if you want to research more about this learning technique. Also, I wrote about reading journals at Heart of the Matter.

Some of you, like me, probably downloaded many of the free Mother’s Day gifts from CurrClick. I really liked the Silly Snail grammar game, but it only covered a few parts of speech. I suggested that Sprite make her own board game about the parts of speech. And here it is!

The game involves answering questions in the quiz books and pulling cards from the Grammar Chest. We had a great time playing it, and it was a fantastic overall review of the parts of speech.

Making a board game and playing it is a great hands-on way to show what you’ve learned. Try it!

Related posts:

1. Homemade Wrapping Paper