Poetry Teatime: Tea, Poetry, and Freewriting!
Hi Julie-
We have been doing teatime off and on for several years now at your suggestion, and it is a highlight of our week.
What I like most about it is that I can take off my “teacher” hat and put on my “mom” hat, and just relate to my children over tea and snacks the way I would do with a friend. It’s so refreshing and encouraging to me, and to my children. We actually do ours on Wednesday, since that works best for our schedule, and helps get over the mid-week doldrums.
Just wanted to share this because it combined the best parts of our Bravewriter lifestyle week: Tea, Poetry and Freewriting!
I found two amazing, different kinds of poetry books at our library that will expand how you think about poetry. Lemonade and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word by Bob Raczka The author has a combined word puzzle, poem and rebus all in one approach! It was so much fun we did a free write at the same time as our Tea….it lasted well over an hour, and they wrote many poems later. Now that’s what I call learning!
It’s best to see the book to understand it (you can look inside on Amazon to see examples). It sounds simple, but it’s actually pretty hard to come up with poems using only the letters found in a single word!
For the first day of October, I made this yummy Pumpkin Baked Oatmeal for our Tea. I find that having my two littlest boys (7 and 4), not only helps me with the preparations of our snack, but also allows me to keep a close eye on them. Plus they are learning to cook.
For our poetry, we used The Arrow Finds It’s Mark: A Book of Found Poems by Georgia Heard, then practiced writing our own “found poems.”
We also used our set of magnetic poetry words (an amazing thrift store find!) to create poems.
Here is a homeschooling website that explains how to create “found poetry.” The possibilities are endless!
Nanci (joyfulmomof6)
Image © Jarenwicklund | Dreamstime.com.
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