Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Fun Poetry Class

I don't know if I've mentioned it here before, but I am quite unsatisfied with Sonlight 3's choice of the book Classic Poetry. It's everything that children expect poetry to be--dreary, boring, and difficult to understand. I have no idea why Sonlight would choose this book.

So, we've been reading Shel Silverstein poetry, which they gobble up and beg for more. Of course.

And then we found something neat and I used it to do two poetry classes this week.

Over at Great Homeschool Videos they have three YouTube videos depicting Robert Frost's poem The Road Less Traveled. (though some called it The Road Not Taken...) First I found the poem online and read it to the kids and we talked about what it meant. Then we watched each of the videos and talked about what we did and didn't like about each, and how each one did or didn't convey what we felt the poem was saying.

Another day we did the same thing with Robert Frost's poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.
We did the same thing with that one.

What I really liked about this was the way we could dive into one simple poem, understand it, and then see how others saw it or told the story. It was fun for variety as well. I had never thought about You Tube as a possibility for poetry lessons, but I will be looking for more of this kind of stuff in the future. It looks like there is a lot more to choose from there.

2 comments:

Luke Holzmann said...

Thank you for your feedback. We're always looking for ways to improve Sonlight, and I will pass along your comments to "the powers that be" [smile].

Is there another book of poetry that you like better or would recommend? I appreciate any feedback or suggestions you may have.

Thanks!

~Luke

Dollymama said...

Hi Luke,
I think that SL already changed out the poetry book for basic 3. Phew! My main complaints about the book was that so much of the poetry was so difficult for my children to understand. (some of it was beyond my understanding!) It was a disappointment to me to have their experience with poetry be a negative one.