Weeek 22 - Poetry and Portfolios

Hello Essentials families,
I hope you all are enjoying your end-of-the-year weeks of memory work drilling and reflecting on what a profitable year of learning it has been with your children.  I have enjoyed teaching IEW this year and I am amazed at each individual child's progress.  What a blessing it is to have the privilege of home schooling our children.

Purposeful Poetry
This week was purposefully planned to be "light" in the writing load.  Enjoy allowing your child the freedom to use alliteration and quality adjectives to their heart's content.  The benefit of completing this poem at the end of the year instead of the beginning is Ancient World Poem is a wonderful opportunity to remember all of the ancient civilizations we have written about and to describe them accurately and with knowledge. If time allows let them use one day to enjoy illustrating and decorating their poem.
Two rules of poetry we mentioned in class:
1) Capitalize the first letter of each line of poetry.
2) Poetry does NOT have to rhyme.

Poetry Style - Personification, Assonance and Consonance p.48 and 49
Two poetry pages I had planned to introduce in class were replaced by going back to the #4 opener and (that) noun clause that had been missed by one class the week before.  Please go over personification, assonance, and/or consonance poetic decorations with your children if time allows this week.  There are some very short exercises to accompany them. CHALLENGE: Encourage them to incorporate at least one of the new decorations: personification, assonance and/or consonance into their poems. You can find these terms and their definitions on pages 48 and 49 GRAY pages of their notebooks.  They will be surprised at how natural and easy it is to add these into their poems.

Personification gives human characteristics to things or ideas.
The fascinating book grabbed my attention.
Assonance: words that have the same internal vowel sound in sequence or in close proximity.
waves clapping and crashing
Consonance: words that end with the same consonant sound used in sequence or in close proximity.
black rocks speckled with snow


I also continue to encourage each student to gather their writings together into a notebook/portfolio of their writing for the 2012-2013 year.  On week 24 they will be invited to bring their notebooks with them to "showcase" their writing and hard work!

Happy writing,
Tina