Poetry Lapbook

It is part of Coqui's curriculum to be introduced to poetry. Every day, he has some reading to do, and sometimes, those texts are poems - which I like because I agree to expose children as early as possible to poetry and it's 'magic'. Also, that curriculum provides eight poems that are to be studied and memorized, about a month for each. So far, he has learned four of them, and he liked doing it and reciting them to Daddy.

So for our themed week, we wanted to take a look at the different types of poems, and have the kids come up with their own. I did a ton of research, for once because it has been a while for me, and secondly, I did not grow up over here, so things are simply called differently. I printed a bunch of poems for us to read and talk about, and then I also printed templates for us to work on our own poems.

Three of the four poems that Coqui had to recite for school were from Robert Louis Stevenson - which is now his favorite poet ;-) . So I printed "Bed In Summer" for reading only - he got a good laugh from it. He also liked reading and coloring the poem "All Things Bright And Beautiful" by Cecil Frances Alexander.


But his absolute favorite poem of this week was "For My Brother, On His Birthday" by Kenn Nesbitt from this webpage. It had everybody laughing on presentation day.


Also, I made him memorize a new poem, very short, and really more a Math 'helper' than anything else. But I found it helpful and surprisingly, he still has trouble getting the order right with this one, which is only an eight-liner. (I mean he memorized one with 24 lines!) But it was a great example of teaching the rhythm of a poem that rhymes.

We used this webpage to create poetry online - a little computer class on the side. He wrote a poem about a tiger here:

We also worked on a sensory poem that is a five-liner using all five senses. His object of choice was a fruit, an orange to be more specific. He made it silly and funny, so the orange "looks delicious, smells like stinky feet, and tastes juicy". Go figure - the mind of a six year old....

Personally, I had never heard of a Haiku before (yes, Mami is learning alongside the kids), but I really enjoyed it and helped Coqui to come up with his own, and he did this one all by himself. We worked with a template from KidZone (link is here).  It didn't request a title, and Mami's title would be Spring - he didn't want to give it a title.

We also did an alliteration with his name, which can not be published here for reasons of privacy. Surprisingly, he had alot of trouble coming up with 'good' stuff about himself. But eventually, we created a poem that has some decent lines.

And last but not least, we looked at the bible, specifically the Psalms that are poems written by great men. We read Psalm 23 multiple times, and as an exercise, I made him copy it, but in cursive writing. He hated it! (Sorry, buddy!) He hated it so much that he screwed it all up the first time, and I made him start all over - yeah, Mami did not score big with this one, but I believe in the discipline of working hard to reach a goal, and better learn it now. But this bad Mama came up with a compromise - instead of writing it all in one week, which caused too much frustration, I made it into a month-long project, one that is still in the working:

I couldn't find a template for this one, so I made my own, which you can download for your personal use here. (Link to a second post, sorry for the inconvenience.)

Here is a last picture from the day we presented our lapbooks with our friends: