Writing Activities: 1 | 2 | 3 | Poetry LinksAbout Drawing

• Putting your voice out into the world is a wonderful thing to do well. If you’re shy or your tongue won’t always work the way you want it to, practice on your own. If you suspect you sound flat and boring, practice some more.
• Ham it up. There’s a performer inside everyone, it just takes a little experimenting to let it out. Start out in private.
• Recite out loud in your own way. Some people’s speaking styles are loud and goofy, some are quiet and suspenseful, some say everything in a way that makes everybody laugh. Start with your own style and get better at it.
• Go more slowwwwwly—if the verse is written well, you can take real advantage of the pauses to draw in your listeners. Rushing through a poem can ruin it.
• If you like a particular poem, read it again the next day, and then on another day, and then again another. The pleasure of good rhyming verse improves with lots of repetition. This is a really good thing to do every morning in class, too. A good start to the day.
• Use gestures — swatting, waving, air-drumming, finger-clicking. Be the orchestra conductor of the poem.
• Beat doesn’t automatically mean noise. Feel rhythms by rocking from side to side, or tapping. Open and close your fingers, clench and unclench toes, knock knees together, or lightly click teeth to get the feel of the beat.
• Getting everyone to recite a poem out loud together is still the most fun you can imagine. Try what Loris calls Rebound Reading — that’s when you say the line, then everyone repeats it after you in exactly the same tone of voice, loud or soft, funny or sombre.
• Throw in sound effects, bark or crash, hiss, repeat lines, get louder or so quiet it’s just a buzz—you can have a ball with this, and it’s an excellent way to for everybody to experiment with their out-loud reciting.

A REALLY GOOD BOOK:

• Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to our Children will Change Their Lives Forever by Mem Fox

Writing Activities: 1 | 2 | 3 | Poetry LinksAbout Drawing

• Write about your own everyday life. Then you can use real details, and make your writing more interesting. Your own life has more funny, serious or beautiful poems in it than you think.
• Be ridiculous. Exaggerate. Make the bully in your poem as big as a refrigerator. Write about the new puppy that can bark to music. Write about wild wishes.
• Try new things — taste new foods, meet new people, go new places, have new experiences, and you’ll have more to write about — even if the new tastes and new people are awful.
• Turn your poem into a song lyric. Most songs are just like rhyming verse, with the rhythms going along with the music.
• Complaints: write poems about stuff you don’t like — this gets you away from cutesy “I love sunshine/I love ice cream” poems.
• Volunteer to write a short verse for your aunt’s wedding or your Grandpa’s birthday. Even if it’s only four lines, it will need decent revising to make it right. People will love it. And you can have the audience make sound effects along with you, if you like.

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“English is a fascinating language. There is probably no other tongue in which there are more ways to say one thing.”

Bill Moore, Words That Taste Good,
Pembroke Publishers/Stenhouse

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“Interesting words don’t cost any more than dull ones.”

Jacqueline Jackson,
children’s author