{Updated from a post at Early Bird Homeschool, April 2010. The girls wrote these poems when they were 5 and 7 years old.}
Poetry is one of our favorite ways to play and create with words.
After reading Spring: An Alphabet Acrostic by Steven Schnur, we wrote our own acrostic poems to celebrate Spring.
Acrostic poems use the letters of a topic word (in our case, SPRING) to begin each line. Each word or phrase of the poem should describe or relate to the topic.
The girls started with some brainstorming in their journals – pictures and lists of spring words:
On scratch paper, we wrote the word SPRING and they chose a word for each letter.
Natalie’s poem:
Sun
Pond
Rain
Iris
Nest
Grass
Delaney’s poem:
Sun
Plants
Robin
Insect
Nest
Garden
Then, they dreamed up an art project for their poems. I helped by cutting the letters to spell spring from watercolor paper, which they decorated with pastels and watercolors.
They glued down the letters and drew stems. We also cut fringe-style grass to glue to the bottom of the paper. Finally, the girls wrote the words for their poems on the stems.
I love pulling out these poems every year to welcome Spring!
Resources:
Spring: An Acrostic Alphabet by Steven Schnur, illustrated by Leslie Evans
This book pairs 26 short acrostic poems with gorgeous hand-colored linoleum block print illustrations – a beautiful book to read again and again. Check out the Summer, Autumn, and Winter versions, too!
ReadWriteThink has a fun interactive acrostic poem module – it provides a definition and guides you through brainstorming words and creating your poem. You can print the finished poem at the end. Pretty neat! I’ll be bookmarking it for both my girls to revisit when the poetry-writing bug strikes.
We’re seeing many signs of Spring around here – how about where you are?
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Not many typical signs of Spring here in southern Siberia yet but you’d be surprised at how springy we feel when we can play in the snow for over an hour and still feel our fingers and toes when we’re done.