Each day, we read a poem out of one of our poetry books. This year, we've read A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson and When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne. Our most recent book of poetry is The Oxford Book of Children's Verse, which is a collection of many poets spanning several centuries.
We combine a few subjects with our poetry. Kathryn chooses a poem and reads it aloud. This is great practice for her and I can make sure she is pronouncing words correctly. Sometimes she will stop and ask me what a certain word means, but usually we wait 'til after she finishes reading. Then she picks a stanza that she likes, and copies it. So that's what we do each day for copywork. Often, by the time she has read it and done her copywork, she has at least that one verse memorized. If she really likes the poem, she ends up reading it more than once.
Yesterday, we read "The Mad Gardener's Song" by Lewis Carroll; he's also the author of Alice In Wonderland, but we've never read that, so we're not very familiar with Carroll's style. Anyway, Kathryn LOVED the poem and thought it was hilarious. She got so tickled that she kept having to stop reading because she was laughing so much! Here's the verse she picked to copy:
We combine a few subjects with our poetry. Kathryn chooses a poem and reads it aloud. This is great practice for her and I can make sure she is pronouncing words correctly. Sometimes she will stop and ask me what a certain word means, but usually we wait 'til after she finishes reading. Then she picks a stanza that she likes, and copies it. So that's what we do each day for copywork. Often, by the time she has read it and done her copywork, she has at least that one verse memorized. If she really likes the poem, she ends up reading it more than once.
Yesterday, we read "The Mad Gardener's Song" by Lewis Carroll; he's also the author of Alice In Wonderland, but we've never read that, so we're not very familiar with Carroll's style. Anyway, Kathryn LOVED the poem and thought it was hilarious. She got so tickled that she kept having to stop reading because she was laughing so much! Here's the verse she picked to copy:
He thought he saw a rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek;
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
At supper, she told Ken about the poem, and quoted way more of it than I remembered; verse this silly gets pretty easily stuck in your head! Then she got out the book and read the whole thing to him. Later, after she was in bed, I heard her talking, so I stopped to listen down the hall. She was reciting the poem again, to her stuffed animals!
