Children Suprise You and They Read Poetry

Kyle Writes a Poetry Book Review
Kyle wrote a poetry book review for his most recent blog. He did this without any guidance from me. He was responsible for posting on the weekend and knew he had to do it before he could play with his friend. In order to get the post done, he woke up early, about 6:30, Saturday morning and got to work on the post. He completed most of the post before I got out of bed. We had spoken about book reviews as a blogging option, but I did not provide him with models or guidance. So, he was completely on his own. He choose to do a book review and he choose a poetry book. I was surprised by his choices, but quite pleased.

Organic Nature of the Language Lesson
Many of the post Kyle does are not thoroughly planned out. From a teaching standpoint, I prefer to let the lesson unfold as a post progresses. The poetry post is a good example of the organic nature of the lessons. I usually find teaching points in what he writes. In this post a lesson evolved from his use of the word hear. After reading his post, I pointed out to Kyle that he wrote "Do you want to hear one?", instead of "Do you want to read one?" Kyle typed out the poem with no intention of adding audio to the post. I then asked him if he wanted to change the word hear to read or if he wanted to record himself reading the poem. He chose to record himself. This required him to practice reading the poem. I took this opportunity to teach him about the rhythm of the poetic line, pauses at the end of lines and changing the tone of his voice when reading. He enjoyed reading the poem. He practiced until he was able to read it straight through without mistakes or long pauses. He gained a new respect for poetry by having to perform the poem himself. This could have been difficult to force upon him with a lesson. But, since the post was his idea and he wrote hear, the recording and the practice seemed a natural progression to him.

A Poetry Book that Encourages Vocabulary Acquisition
The Dragons are Singing Tonight by Jack Prelutsky is poetry book written for young boys. The poems are fantastical and are all about dragons. The poetry is rhythmical and reads very well, but the poems are not simple. They are complex grammatically and use challenging vocabulary. As an educator, I really value texts that my child is interested in and that challenge his language ability. This book does just that. That said, the gist of the poetry is still attainable without understanding the challenging vocabulary words. We have been reading this book since Kyle was five. He didn't understand all that was being read to him, but he still loved the book. Now that he is older, he can read the poems himself and is interested in knowing exactly what they mean. He uses his dictionary and/or comes to me for explanations. In this poem amiable, fret and tremble required the dictionary.

The Sound File Converted to a Movie
We used Audacity to record Kyle's reading of the poem. Audacity is a simple to use freeware program. After recording the poem, we converted the audio file into a video file with Windows Movie Maker. We did this because Blogger does not accept audio uploads. It is simpler to upload a video to the site than to get an account elsewhere to host the audio. The picture from the book was available at Amazon.com.