Summer's end: Diamante

Today Olea had a friend over for a few hours and to keep Zurich and Nev away from them we made more Monsters at Zurich's request. I burned myself worse than I ever have with a hot glue gun today. Let's put that down in the record books... After Olea's friend left Olea wanted to make another one too. (She got to) But that wasn't today's project. By this time Nev had enjoyed her puppet and put herself down for a nap. I figured that was probably best for today's project.

Writing poetry.

I chose a format: Diamante poem

I had the kids play with Cooties to keep their wiggles busy and then I asked the kids some questions. First I asked them what they wanted their poem to be about. What change they wanted to happen in their poem and then I asked them to describe different things to me. I used their responses to fill in the blanks so to speak. We did Zurich's first because I thought his would be hardest... Not so. He answered the questions I asked and Olea kept over thinking it. It worked out though, and Zurich's disclaimer is that his sister poisoned his mind that his tree poem should have fairies in it.

Here is a little sound blip from my questioning in our poem creation. They had to say the word in direct response to a question about their poem for it to be used. I did rearrange some of the words to help the flow, but they are the kid's work. Listening to them I wonder how I last through the day.... :)
Here is a sound bite from the creation of Olea's poem:

http://blip.tv/file/get/CorettiConfetti-FoundPoetry237.m4a

and Zurich's: http://blip.tv/file/get/CorettiConfetti-FoundPoetry237.m4a

After their poems were written I let each of them type up as much of it as they wanted and then I finished typing the rest for them.

I read Zurich his poem and he picked a font and a color and then using google images he picked some pictures to go around his poem. I was impressed as he sat on my lap humming and hawing over the right images as he was very focused on the subject of his poem. Olea too had very definite ideas of the images and the way she wanted it to look.

When they each were satisfied we printed their poems out to hang on their magnet boards in their rooms after showing them to Daddy, of course.

The kids wanted to share all the monster puppets they have made.