Poetry at the beach

April is National Poetry Month in the US. To find out more about this, connect to http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41

As Flat Stanley just came back from CA with some exciting beach adventures, we decided to celebrate poetry by taking it to the beach.

This gave us a chance to play with words and shells in the sand. First, to get into the mood, we created sand paintings with the day's key words : beach, ocean, sand, sea, seagull, shell ...

















After reading Shel Silverstein's poem "The Invisible Boy" :

And here we see the invisible boy
In his lovely invisible house,
Feeding a piece of invisible cheese
To a little invisible mouse.
Oh, what a beautiful picture to see!
Will you draw an invisible picture for me?

we took a Xerox copy of the poem, cut up the individual words, and moved them around to create a new, group poem on the blackboard ...



The lovely invisible mouse,
Invisible cheese house, invisible me.
To invisible beautiful picture,
Oh, we draw.

(5 year olds, Tuesday)



An invisible boy
Found a little mouse
In a lovely house.

(3-5 year olds, Wednesday)





Draw invisible me
Feeding an invisible mouse
In a lovely invisible house.

(6 year olds, Wednesday)






Picture little me
Feeding an invisible mouse.
We draw a lovely boy and see a little house.

(7-11 year olds, Wednesday)


Next, we listened to "Jazz poet" Jack Kerouac's recording of his "American Haïku" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJdxJ5llh5A


Then, inspired to create our own haïkus, everybody chose some of the word tiles and used them to form short, individual poems, like little haïkus in the sand.


























































The Tuesday group celebrated by putting together Charlotte's giant USA puzzle ...










We did it !