Poetry Friday: Unschooling Poetry with Ramona

The other day at the library, Ramona (age 6) plopped down in front of the computer. She loves to search for books via the online catalog.



She typed:

Emily Dickinson

Then she looked at me.

I nodded (affirming her spelling) and she clicked. We decided we'd go grab a biography of the Belle of Amherst.

Then she typed:

Robert Frost

I said, "You've been paying attention!"

"To what?" she asked slyly. "You mean to the poets we read?"

"To everything, apparently," I replied.

She moved on, and typed in: O g d e n N a s h ....

*****

I don't "teach" poetry to my kids very often. What I do most often is read it to them. I share favorites. I invite them into the words I love. I email links to my older girls, gems they'll discover in their Inboxes at their leisure -- like this fun link to a magnetic poetry site, shared in last week's Poetry Friday post at A Wrung Sponge.

Oh, yes, as Anne moves into high school we'll step it up, dig further in, round out her poetry education. We'll discuss more about form, structure, rhyme schemes and poets' dreams.

But even then we won't be "done." One's education in language is a lifelong endeavor.


Here's my own quick grab-bag-poem from the magnetic poetry site:

approach
observe ink
movement rhythm metaphor
impression
chisel symbol
dazzle
demand
imagine capture

Julie Larios is hosting the Poetry Friday round up at The Drift Record.