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Composing Music Poetry can be set to music as children create melody and identify the rhythmical elements. One group of talented 7-year-olds composed music to accompany their own sad tale of a princess who was captured during a battle and taken from her palace. Her knight-in-arms wandered the lonely countryside in search of her, while the poor princess grieved for him in her prison tower. The children made up a musical theme for each of the main characters, which they repeated during the various movements of their composition. The story was first told to their classmates and then the song was played on the autoharp and glockenspiel. Older students composed a three-movement rhythmical symphony for Ged in Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. A recorder repeated Ged's theme in appropriate places in this percussion piece. When literature provides the inspiration for children's musical compositions, children's appreciation for both literature and music will be enriched. Le Guin, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea. Illustrated by Ruth Robbins. Parnassus, 1968. Experimenting with Poetry Poetry provides many opportunities for children's writing. Eve Merriam's Quiet, Please invites children to imagine quiet sound--"ferns fluttering by the pond" or "invisible writing of butterflies." A group of 7- and 8-year-olds studied Tomie de Paola's The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog and created additional verses such as "She went to the hen house to get him an egg. / But when she got back, he was holding his leg." After reading The Book of Pigericks by Arnold Lobel, a small group of fourth-graders wrote their own "Bugericks."
de Paola, Tomie. The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog. Harcourt Brace, 1981. Reader's Theater Poetry Readers' theater also works for some poetry. Poems that include conversation, such as Karla Kuskin's "Where Have You Been, Dear?" or "The Question," found in her collection Dogs & Dragons, Trees & Dreams, have been successfully interpreted in this way. Children reading Mollie Hunter's The Mermaid Summer might also wish to read "Overheard on a Saltmarsh," the conversation between a nymph and a goblin about a necklace of green glass beads. This is in Isabel Wilner's collection The Poetry Troupe, which includes many poems for choral reading and readers' theater.
Hunter, Mollie. The Mermaid Summer. Harper & Row, 1988. Publishing Poetry on the Web Several sites on the World Wide Web are dedicated to the publication of children's poetry. Visit these sites with your students and discuss the poetry that you find there. Encourage your students to develop poems for submission to these pages. As noted previously, it is important to consider your school's policy on parental permission for posting student work on the Internet. Poetry Post |