Take a Walk on the Poetry Side
Take a Poetry Walk
Spring is finally here! A perfect time to take a poetry walk with your children (or students). It is a simple way to kickstart poetry month with writers of all ages - even those reluctant ones.
How do you do it? Just like Grandfather Eto and Kiyoshi in Kiyoshi’s Walk, you walk, choose a spot to silently linger for 5-10 minutes (spread out to get some privacy) and write anything you want. Then you share and move on to a new spot.
While lingering, you carefully observe with all your senses to search for something to write about: a frisky pair of squirrels playing tag across a tree, the song of birds looking for a mate, the smooth surface of a rock, the music of the wind, the smell of damp earth, or the busy-ness of your street, town, or city. Give your children the option to share all they have written or just their best line.
Jots to Poems
Initially, the writing may just be a few short jots: flower, yellow, green leaves, moving in the breeze. You can’t expect magic by just handing a child a journal and pencil! The success of a poetry walk builds with each writing stop - from share to share. As with any type of writing, it helps to model so be sure to share your own writing. In this demonstration, you can show how you expand a simple observation (like the above jots) into something more poem-like:
Flower yellow.
Leaves green.
You shiver
in the cool
spring breeze.
Perhaps it is
a dance
in celebration
of spring’s return.
Poetry Mentors
As with all kinds of writing, it helps to have poetry mentors. As Lester Laminack says:
“It needs to be in the ear before it can come out of the pen.”
Maybe think about tucking in a poem along with your nightly bedtime story ritual. There are many great poetry anthologies. One of my favorites to use when my son was small was Read Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young by Jack Prelutsky.
I also encourage you to visit poet and teacher Amy Ludwig Vanderwater’s The Poem Farm. She will have your child transformed into a poet in no time. She is magical!
