Each week Ruth Ayres extends an invitation to share and celebrate events, big or small, from our week.
This week I had the privilege of working with K-5 students at our SPARK (Super Powered Activities to Recharge Kids) camp for high ability kids. I always teach poetry which I LOVE because many times the creative side of writing is smothered (and sometimes eliminated!) by the gotta-get-em-ready-for-the-test writing.
This camp is an outlet for those creative students. My session is hard to compete against drones, Spheros, Ollies, 3D printers, 3Doodlers, and Augmented Reality. But on the first day when others had technical difficulties, my group "charged" on with good ole paper and pencil! No, my kids did not fly drones through hula hoops or have races with Ollies and Spheros. Instead, they created beautiful poems that can be shared with the world. That is a celebration.
My first session was K-2nd grade, and this was the first year I had kindergartners. I have to admit, I was a little nervous. I was not sure what kind of writing to expect from them. I ended up enjoying this session most of all. We wrote list poems, color poems, and diamante and then created a gallery in Google slides. Here is a link if you would like to view the entire gallery.
My second session was with 3rd-5th graders, and several of them were kids I had last summer. I started out teaching poems which were number related such as haiku, zip ode, fibonacci poetry, and cinquain. But many of them remembered the word play poems we did last year, and that ended up being what they wanted to write. Friday we culminated our week with a Skype visit with Laura Purdie Salas. Here is the link to their gallery.
Today I celebrate paper and pencils and poetry!
