Are you all ready for a St. Patrick's Day celebration this weekend?
Try your luck at this Leprechaun puzzle.
Or if you'd like to discover how to write a Limerick, check out this information and write an example on a shamrock, no less.
And of course, there are always fun Irish stories to read. In A POT OF GOLD by Kathleen Krull, you'll be sure to find plenty of entertaining shenanigans.
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
I recently spent time with the Fifth and Sixth Classes at Scoil Mhuire gan Smál in Graignamanagh and what a pleasure that was. A lovely school and I found the pupils so enthusiastic and so talented. We did a few sessions on character development, opening paragraphs, limericks and general writing and I enjoyed every minute of it. It is a treat to go into a school where the pupils are happy and involved, where evidence of creative teaching is all about the place and where you get a sense of proper learning taking place. I have seen a lot of this in the primary schools I have visited over the past couple of years. Well done to all of you, Principal, all the staff and pupils. And a big thank you for having me visit your school. I have put up a few of the limericks some of the girls wrote on my School Pages. Hopefully I will get a few more of them (or their stories) in the post!
On March 1 I presented the new month's calendar to my kindergarteners. Although many in my school enjoy the undeniable convenience of a calendar stored on the computer and presented on the Promethean Board, I still make a grid on a big sheet of 1-inch graph paper and hang it at the front of the room. The physical work of each day's Calendar Marker is then always visible, birthdays and other special days can be referred to at any time, and the months become concrete artifacts that line the top of the walls and create a timeline of our kindergarten experience. Call me old-fashioned, but I think 5- and 6-year-olds need this concrete, omnipresent record of passing time in order for it to begin making sense.
So there was the blank calendar, with weekend numbers recorded and a small green shamrock in the number 17 box. "What do you notice?" I asked the class. Some of the responses were...
"What is that green leaf for?"
"I notice a clover for Leprechaun Day!"
"St. Patrick's Day is coming."
I acknowledged these varying levels of familiarity and began a short and challenging explanation of
St. Patrick's Day for a widely diverse group of children--after all, how do you fit the gigantic concepts of Christianity/Catholicism, sainthood, Ireland, history, immigration, cultural traditions and leprechaun magic into two sentences? After my first sentence about how many kinds of people have come to live in America, just like some families in our class, and have brought their celebrations with them, like Chinese New Year, I started to say,
"St. Patrick was--" and then got interrupted by a visitor at the door.
Bryon filled the pause that followed:
"--a rock star?!"****************************Have you heard of the rock star called Patrick
Who pulled off a Catholic hat trick?
The shamrock he takes;
The Irish he makes
Into Christians with wakes,
Then banishes snakes.
I'd like to see Bono do that trick!
Heidi Mordhorst 2012all rights reserved****************************
Okay, I worked way too long on that terrible piece of nonsense. I may have to come back and try again with a poem on the bigger idea of the rock stars of Kindergarten: those personalities who loom large in the K curriculum and the way their contributions do or don't make sense in the egocentric, here-and-now minds of 5-year-olds. Happy upcoming St. Patrick's Day, folks.
I hope you've been celebrating NATIONAL POETRY MONTH. Even though we're more than halfway through the month, it's not too late to start. Click on the link above, and you'll find lots of ideas. A really simple and wonderful idea is to write a poem each day.
If you're a teacher, this link offers ideas on ways to use poetry with your students. If you're a student, you could try to finish the Limerick or create a special poem of your own. Want to read some poems? Check out these classic children's poems. For some silly poems, check out Giggle Poetry--or a collection of Shel Silverstein poems like WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS.
What is your favorite poem?
No, I haven't misread my calendar; I do know that April,
not May, is National Poetry Month. But now that standardized testing is over for most of us, what better way to explore words and language than through some picture books?
While I'm a huge fan of
Prelutsky,
Viorst,
Silverstein, and the other "giants" of poetry, I'd like to share some authors, titles, and series which might be new to you. These are guaranteed to get kids excited about reading and writing poetry!
A great place to start is with the
Graphic Poetry series from
Brightpoint Literacy. The
sixteen books in the series provide a number of components which help students and teachers alike enjoy and analyze the poems with confidence and understanding. In Pat Mora's
Same Song/Maestro, for example, each poem is preceded by an introduction which points out important aspects of the poem students are about to read. The poems are first presented line by line with illustrations, and then as a whole. At book's end, both poems and their common theme (in this case, characterization) are discussed in detail, and some questions for discussion are included. A short feature autobiography of the poet rounds out the book.
In this format, poetry is visual,
nonintimidating, and comprehensible (finally!). In other words, the graphic format combats all the complaints I've heard from students who claim that they hate poetry.
If you're seeking a resource for older students, I'd suggest
Enslow's Poetry Rocks! series, aimed at middle school and up crowd. You can check out an
interactive version of
Not the End, But the Beginning
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Building a Passion for Poetry as of 1/1/1900
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