A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

“What about teatime?” my five year old daughter asked me. I anticipated the disappointment in her face if I told her that we couldn’t have teatime because I was running late and we had to rush to pick up her three year old sister from preschool.

I’d read about Tuesday Teatimes on the BraveWriter web site and had been immediately enchanted with the idea. We normally had teatime just before picking up the three year old because I wasn’t so enchanted with the spills, crumbs, squirming, and interruptions that come with a toddler. I sighed and thought about my blue mug that my older daughter had shattered at our very first teatime and wondered how much more damage her younger sister could do. Then I let it go. “Today we’re going to have teatime with sissy.”

Since then all three of us have had several teatimes. I prepare a sweet snack and hot chocolate or lemonade. We set the table with lovely, fragile dishes and a cheap boquet of flowers from the grocery store. My five year old and I take turns reading poems from our growing collection of poetry books. The three year old turns her food into a growing mound of crumbs. We have a good time and move on to the rest of the day.

Then last week teatime started paying extra dividends. We were on our weekly nature walk when I heard my five year old say

“Under the lily pads,
Throughout the pond,
Nice and pretty,
Nice and blond.”

At the first two lines I thought she was quoting something from teatime. Then with the last two lines, it dawned on me that she had created her own poem about the white fish we were looking at.

At teatime the next day, my daughter asked if she could recite her own poem, and of course I said yes.

If you need some quick copy work, look no further than your iTunes or CD rack. Song lyrics are our culture’s poetry. All those poetic devices you want to teach your kids can be just as easily taught with a good song. For tomorrow’s tea, gather some of your favorites and ask your kids to pick a favorite song to share. Print the lyrics (you can Google song lyrics by putting the song title into the Google search bar and they will pop right up). Then while you sip, play the song and look at the lyrics together. Look for metaphor, simile, rhyme, rhythm, imagery, alliteration, internal rhyme (where the words rhyme in the middle of the line, not necessarily only at the end). It will be a refreshing break from books. (Hint: I do this in every comp class I teach at our homeschool co-op and it is the most favorite activity of the whole year.)

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