I Wish I Were a Fish (a poem)

We read a few poems with this form: AAB, CCB ... and liked it. A well-known one is the poem At the Seaside by Robert Louis Stevenson. We composed a poem using this form; drawing inspiration from the guppies in our aquarium.

I Wish I Were a Fish

How wonderful it is to be a fish
To always be free to swim and swish
My delicate rainbow tail.

I can sleep whenever I'm tired
And have lots of peace and quiet
No noisy siblings with tiresome tales.

I can play hide-and-seek all day
On pastures of green algae
Or chase and dance with pretty ladies.

No use crying if my friend dies
Just nibble him up! Isn’t that nice?
A fish's life is filled with jollies!

Horse Unit Study (part 3) - Horse Poetry Book

We found an anthology of poems on Horses called A Classic Illustrated Treasury: Horses at the library.

There was even one poem by William Shakespeare!

Round hooft, short jointed, fetlocks shag, and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs, & passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:
Look what a Horse should have, he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.

I was a little amused at how Shakespeare used pairs of adjective-nouns in this poem. That was somewhat similar to what we'd started out with when we first drafted our poem on the Centipede!

Another poem stood out from the rest.

My Pony
by "A."

How charming it would be to rear,
And have hind legs to balance on;
Of hay and oats within a year
To leisurely devour a ton;
To stoop my head and quench my drought
With water in a lovely pail;
To wear a snaffle in my mouth,
Fling back my ears, and slash my tail!

This poem gave me an idea for our next writing assignment! In my following post, I will share our poem on how wonderful it is to be a fish. :-)

A Poem : Centipede

In my opinion, the easiest way to learn to write is to see and hear the thoughts of a writer in the act of writing. As such, I see a lot of value in collaborative writing. When writing together, I can talk out how I choose words or phrases, and the "whys" and "how-tos" of editing and revising.

I expect that initially, the end product may tend to sound more like me than like them. To me, this is acceptable. It is my hope that gradually, they would internalize some of these methods I am using in my writing. Hopefully with time and practice, their own personal styles would emerge.

Here's our attempt at team composition:

I thought it would be interesting to write a poem about the centipede since we have a living specimen to observe. We brainstormed for adjectives that can be used to describe a centipede and for action verbs that centipedes normally engaged in. With this list of words, and with active looking out for rhyming words, we composed this poem.

Centipede

I am slimy.
I am tiny.
I'm a burrower.
I’m a wriggler.
I’m a segmented, many-legged,
Shiny armoured, mighty stinger.

People hate me.
Want me dead!
Stamp their feet
And hit my head.
So I scare them with a bite,
From my poison claws all right!

Start of Horse Unit Study

My boys have developed an interest in horses and I thought I should take this opportunity to do a Horse Unit Study. We don't normally do Unit Studies but I think doing it once in a while, maximizing on current interests, can be a nice break from our usual routine.

I have just started the Unit Study with a chapter book The White Stallions of Lipizza by Marguerite Henry (a Sonlight selection). In the second chapter of the book, we learned about the names of the Lipizzaner ballet routine. Here they are :
(We found video clips of each to better understand the moves.)

1. piaffe
2. levade
3. coubette
4. capriole

The complete Lipizzaner routine.

Here is our narration/description of these different stunts in poem form:

The Lipizzaner Routines

The white stallions of Lipizza
Will always bring shouts of "Bravo!"
They are trained to perform piaffes,
Levades, courbettes and caprioles.

A piaffe is a move,
In which the horse will trot
And never go forward
But stay on the spot.

If you see a horse on two legs,
You are looking at a levade.
The show horse is still.
Horses do this in a parade.

See the horse rear up
And hop on its hind legs.
A horse doing a courbette
Is like a horse dancing a ballet.

A leap! A kick
Of the hind legs in the air.
With all four legs off the ground,
The capriole is an act that is rare.

The white stallions of Lipizza
Will always bring shouts of "Bravo!"
They are trained to perform piaffes,
Levades, courbettes and caprioles.

Credits:
Second stanza on piaffe by B.
Third stanza on levade by D.
Fifth stanza on capriole collaboration between B and I.

As I am typing this, my boys are having a ball of a time on all fours, pretending to be horses and attempting these four moves... and yes it's even more fun with a rider on the back shouting out commands!

Medieval Birthday Celebration

Preparation for the Medieval Party started about two weeks before the event. Invitation cards were sent out and details were planned. Actual gathering of material and making of things took place a week before. It was a nice departure from our usual school routine. This happened to coincide with the one week school holidays so we had "lighter" school days then.


Costume

We wanted a costume party but did not expect our guests to come with the appropriate costumes. In any case, we don't have costumes either. We figured we could make very simple ones. This is what I did. I used gray coloured cotton fabric, cut them into rectangular sheets and use a safety pin to pin the back and front flaps at the shoulders. I had initially wanted to sew / hem these but time did not permit that. I was glad the fabric we chose lasted one wear with rather minimal fraying.

D and B designed their own coat of arms. We read the book Coat of Arms by Catherine Daly-Weir. This book comes with templates so that made it easier. The symbols and animal designs were drawn or traced onto coloured papers and then cut out. These cut-outs were then glued with white glue on a shield shaped flannel. The completed crest was in turned glued onto the gray armour. (I am beginning to discover how useful white glue is!) This method required no sewing at all!!! What a time saver?!

Coat of Arms gives detailed explanation on the significance of the colours and symbols that are often used. These are my boys' final products. They each made crests for all the members in their group for the Dragon Hunt.



Welcome Table / Decoration

I found idea of giving fictitious names to our little guests from this site. We came out with ridiculous sounding names that are food related (Straw of Berry, Gin of Ger, Guard of Lick, Man of Gostin etc...) These names were written on ice-cream sticks that were decorated to look like mini swords. The idea was to let our guest draw a "sword" out from the "rock" like King Aurthur style. The illuminated letters we made were put to good use in a little poem I composed to explain what to do.





Music

What is a party without music?! I hunted long for these and asked at forums to finally find a site that allows for download of MP3s! Gregorian Chants and other such church music (which are what most people know of music of that period) were much to solemn so I chose Medieval Dances instead. Here is a site of Medieval Dances. I selected the album from Anstrorran Dance Symposium for our "banquet".


Craft 1 - Glorious Goblets

I wanted to occupy the children while they waited for the food to be ready. I got the idea of decorating plastic wine goblets with sequins from this site. These are some that were decorated by the children.


These goblets were then used during the party for drinks. No problem with mixed-up cups ;-)


Archery

We have two wooden bows we bought long ago at Daiso. D and B love to play with these; shooting chopsticks along our corridor. We experimented and found that these bows could actually be used to shoot chopsticks into cardboard boxes!


D and B were excited to let their friends try their hands on some archery too. However, we were worried the bows might give way if they were pulled too hard so we decided to add a toilet roll core on our target board as the bull's eye instead. Accurate shots, regardless of the power of the shot, would lodge the arrow into the tube; the arrow should sit comfortably in the tube even if it doesn't pierce the cardboard. This set up worked pretty well :-) I think the children enjoyed this quite a bit.



Craft 2 - Medieval Arrows

Chopsticks as arrows don't look very pretty. We decided to dress our arrows up! I found how to make a medieval arrow from this video clip. I simplify the steps a little and tried to teach this to the kids. This craft required some fine motor skills so mothers were roped in to help. This project didn't turn out too well but I hope some interest was generated :-b

Dragon Hunt


I sent the children on a wild-goose-chase kind of Dragon Hunt. Each clue was written in a poem that played around with words. I composed these poems one day while my boys stayed over at their grandparent's place. I enjoyed myself thoroughly and in the process renewed my interest in poetry! The children had to decipher the clues. There was just a lot of scrambling around from place to place - all around my estate. :-D

I originally intended them to find the dragon and throw tennis balls into the eye of the dragon. But because we were running late, the final Dragon thrashing was skipped. :-(



Food

We had medieval potash with bread. Traditionally, potash was marshy soup with potatoes, beans and various spices. I concocted one without the more unfamiliar stuff. I decided to have pizza as a supplement just in case people are not used to medieval food.

It has become a "tradition" for me to bake apple pies instead of birthday cakes for my boys. (They are two of those weird kids who dislike cakes.) So I did bake two apple pies. Unfortunately, I didn't time myself properly so the baking time extended into the time for preparation of the other party food. As a result, my poor guests had to wait patiently for their lunch.

My dear husband was such a great help in the kitchen that day with assembling the pizzas while I got the children organized and prepared the other stuff. In our original plan, he was supposed to be the jester - juggling and entertaining... haha. Well, thankfully we don't have grumpy guests to cheer up and the children were left to entertain themselves most of the time.


All in all...

We all had fun!! Fun during the preparation as well as during the party itself. I am just super exhausted after that! I truly think it was well worth it though.

I kind of like this sort of themed party. May consider doing a Greek /Roman themed party next time... but without the food. Haha... Cooking is really not my forte :-)

Cinquains

Most of the poems we read are in two of these usual forms:
1. couplets (aabb)
2. quatrain (abab)

My boys obviously enjoy poems that rhyme. They will always "complain" when we read a poem that doesn't rhyme. But recently, we came across a few that we rather liked. They were from a poem book called Butterfly Eyes and Other Secret of the Meadow by Joyce Sidman. (Thanks tjm! for the recommendation!) Quite a number of the poems are free form, and one particular one uses the cinquain form (unrhymed: 1 word, 2 words, 3 words, 4 words, 1 word... or 2 syllables, 4 syllables, 6 syllables, 8 syllables, 2 syllables... I found several definitions!). Sidman's poem were also all in riddles. That made it even more interesting for the young ones!

We thought this form sounded fun. My boys were inspired and subsequently came up with a few poems of their own using this form. Here is one by B (not strictly cinquain).

A ball.
A ball rolls.
A ball rolls into water.
A ball rolls into water and floats away.
Whoa!
Where did it go?

This one by B is a more strict syllablic cinquain.

Horses
Walk, trot, canter
And gallop. These are gaits.
They are different ways horses move
About.

More on B's blog :-)

Poem Fever

My boys simply love poems. Every time I finish reading one, they will be begging for more. So we can seldom just read ONE poem (as recommended by Ambleside Online).

I have to confess that I have not been reading poems as regularly as planned. But I think not much "harm" was done. We will take it from wherever we are and start from there! I am now resolved to read at least 2 before our chapter book read alouds. This is just to ensure it doesn't get forgotten :-b

So here is what we are reading now. A wonderful book of poems arranged by subjects called Read-Aloud Poems for Young People: Readings from the Worlds Best Loved Verses by Glorya Hale. (Similar to the better known Favorite Poems Old and New by Helen Ferris.) I appreciated the extra biographical sketches provided about the poets which often heightened interest somewhat.

In fact, my boys have recently took to liking poetry so much that they have even started composing some themselves. They unabashedly claim to be "poets". (Well, if you write, you are a writer. If you draw, you are an artist. So in the same line of reasoning, since they write poems, they are poets! :-D I decided I didn't want to "burst their bubble"...)

I sometimes speak to them in rhymes just to show them that it really isn't that difficult to compose rhyming verses off the top of our heads. They are always very tickled whenever I do that and would be challenged to respond in similar rhyming verses! Sometimes we may end up with something nonsensical and have a good laugh.

I see value simply in their wanting to compose. In my efforts to encourage them, I felt I needed them to know that there is a place for nonsensical poems. This is where I found our collection of Edward Lear's Nonsense Poems useful. Read-Aloud Poems for Young People also has a section called Laughing Lyrics that my boys especially enjoy.

Do you have any poetry books to recommend?

I think this "poem" fever
is here to stay.
And will get hotter
and hotter each day! :-)