Poetry: Rhythm, Rhyme & Thesauruses

We haven't done any formal work on poetry yet - only exposure from nursery rhymes, songs, or whatever happens to come up in books! So we spent the last few weeks immersing ourselves in poetry books and trying to write our own poems.

We began by visiting the library and taking out a load of poetry anthologies. Alhamdulillah our local library had a good selection so no need to buy any to get what I wanted! One book which stood out though was compiled by Julia Donaldson. The girls recognised her name straightaway as she's been a popular author in this house for a while! And it contained a good mix of both modern and classic poetry. We were also recently gifted this beautiful, nature-themed hardback anthology, which not only feels like a luxury to look through, but also contains the perfect mixture of modern and simple enough poems the toddler can understand to more complex and classic poetry to stretch the twins. I also went through the workbooks I have and found some good comprehension sheets based on poems for the girls to do 1-2 each week.

The girls are already very familiar with the concept of rhyming so I didn't want to dwell on that aspect too much. I did make sure to point out any cases where the poem didn't rhyme though to highlight the fact not all poetry has to be rhyming! So for the first week we just did lots of reading - together and individually - and discussion: about what they thought of the poem, likes and dislikes, the rhythm and structure, what the poem meant or its purpose, etc. We came up with the definition together: poetry is just playing with words.

The second week, we focused on rhythm and repeating lines/patterns in poetry, highlighting examples from the books and also doing this particular comprehension:

Afterwards, we used it as a basis for their own poem about shoes. We discussed it together first, both thinking about shoes (what do shoes do? What different ways can you move in your shoes? They took it in turns, one moving around on the floor and the other writing a verb to describe it on the whiteboard, eg spinning, jumping, kicking, etc to create a long list) and about the structure of the poem (which part repeats? What effect does it have? Which lines need to rhyme? How long should our poem be?) then I sat with them individually to help them write their own (Where is your poem set? Which shoes would be suitable? What are you doing there? How are the shoes moving? Look at the list on the whiteboard to help!). I also prompted them with a variety of rhyming words to choose from when they wanted it (let's go through the alphabet to see what rhymes, or almost rhymes. Which word makes most sense?) and this is what they came up with:

When they were done, I showed them how to search for pictures on Google and they chose a couple to illustrate their work.

The next week I wanted to concentrate on expanding their vocabulary, so introduced the idea of synonyms and using a thesaurus. First, I reminded them that poems don't always need to rhyme, then found an example of a riddle to use as a scaffold. Next, I modelled with them how to write the beginning to a poem about animals, which gives a clue to what the animal is on each line. We tipped out some toy animals onto the floor to help give them a visual and they chose to use a camel as the example. So I asked them to look at the toy and describe what a camel is like (think about what it looks like, what it does, where it lives...), did the same for an ostrich, and together we came up with the two verses:

I have two bumpy humps,
I'm brown and yellow,
I live in the sandy desert,
I like to spit out runny spit,
I'm a camel!

I like to put my head in the ground,
I become scared when an animal comes,
I'm big with a long neck,
I live in Africa,
I'm an ostrich!

I recapped editing with them, to check for mistakes and improve their work, and read through the verses asking them what they thought their reader was imagining after each line. Would it be more fun if we tried to trick the reader so they get a surprise? I used the second verse as the example by rearranging it:

I live in Africa, (could it be a lion? or an elephant?)
I'm big with a long neck, (no, it must be a giraffe!)
I become scared when an animal comes, (...I guess it could be a giraffe?)
I like to put my head in the ground, (wait, giraffes don't put their heads in the ground!)
I'm an ostrich! (ohhh! let me read the verse again - yes, that makes sense!)

The girls found this hilarious. 😂 So I asked them if they wanted to rearrange the camel verse too and they did. 😁

I typed up these two verses into Word, then helped the twins individually to come up with two more verses of their own for animals of their choice.

When they were done and it was time to edit, I explained the concept of a thesaurus to them. Sometimes, you might feel like the word you have is boring and you want to change it, but you can't think of a better one yourself... When that happens, you can look in a thesaurus - it lists words which are synonyms, i.e. words with similar meanings. I showed them how to use the built-in thesaurus in Word, then they went through their poems and used the thesaurus to make their poem more interesting.

Finally, I printed their work out so they could illustrate it.

When Papa came home that evening, they read their poems to him and asked him to guess what the animal was after each line. They were both pleased their tricks worked and he didn't guess correctly straightaway. 😂👍

Horizontal & Vertical with Watercolours

The words horizontal and vertical are mentioned in the Year 2 NC for Numeracy, so I decided to explain them to the girls in the context of an art lesson...

I wrote the words on the whiteboard ("What do those mean??!") then held up the pen upright and said, "The pen is vertical," followed by holding it up on its side and saying, "The pen is horizontal," and repeating a couple of times with the pen and then with my finger and finally my arm. "What do you think vertical and horizontal mean?" MashaAllah the girls came up with vertical as standing up straight and horizontal as lying down. 👌

To make sure, I asked them to find examples of things or lines around the room which were either vertical or horizontal - e.g. the edges of the mirror, the window, the corners of the room - then to make themselves horizontal and vertical, which they found hilarious. 😂

On the whiteboard I drew a simple picture of the sky above some grass and told them it showed the horizon - the line where the sky meets the earth (could be the ground or the sea! Another quick scribble to demonstrate!). I wrote the word horizon next to my drawings and asked if they noticed anything about the word... Yes, it's inside the word horizontal! Underlined it within the word horizontal on the whiteboard to make it clearer... And is the horizon horizontal? Yes! (So a quick Literacy lesson on using other knowledge to help guess meanings of new words/word origin 😁)

So their task for today was to draw their own picture of a horizon, to help them remember the word horizontal, and also to include something with vertical lines in their picture too. What kinds of things could they draw? What could they possibly find outside with vertical lines? E.g. tree trunks, buildings, flower stems...

When they'd finished their drawing in pencil on a piece of white card, I took out the watercolour paints; this is where the art lesson comes in.

It was their first time using watercolours so it took a bit of explaining on how to wet the brush, wash it in between, how to mix colours on the palette, change the consistency and strength of the paint depending how much water/paint they used, to keep an eye on how dirty the water was so it could be changed... Quite a lot going on! But easy to pick up just by getting on with it, painting and experimenting!

The toddler joined in too, painting her own picture of whatever. 😄

The Moon

We recapped moon phases, first with a quick oral quiz, then checking by reading the book Hello Mr Moon (can't recommend this book enough!).

So why does the moon look different as the month goes on? Because its always there, but we can only see the parts reflecting the sun... Which changes as the moon orbits the Earth! (I had the ambition to make a model of this using ping pong balls and colouring them in, but you know, lack of time with a baby! Alhamdulillah the girls are bright and seemed to get the concept without one, just from books, YouTube vids and our visit to the National Space Centre!)

So we wrote up this prediction together:

And decided to try and keep a moon diary to test if it was true!

I thought now would be a good time of year to do this activity, since the sun sets earlier, the nights are longer, and there would be more opportunity to see the moon - right? Turns out not really, because the nights were so cold they were often too foggy to see anything. And the moon spends most of the early part of the night behind the houses across the street, so they would have had to stay up until past 8pm to see it anyway. 😖 Never mind though! So we started out our diaries, but after the first week had 5 days of "too cloudy", we decided to just keep an eye on the moon whenever we could - with the expectation it would be a new moon again in line with the new Islamic month and full again a month from when we started our investigation... Which, of course, it was! 🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕

Stars, Asteroids, Comets & Meteoroids

Some highlights from our Space unit:

What is the sun? What are stars made from?

We read through a variety of non-fiction books from the library to research the answers to these questions... The sun is the star around which the planets of our solar system orbit. F cleverly commented from this, "Does that mean that if there were planets going around other stars, they would be like the sun for those planets?" 😍👍

Stars are made from lots and lots of tiny pieces of dust and gas hitting against each other, and every time they do they create heat and light (a nuclear reaction!). 💥 I needed to briefly explain what I meant by a "gas" (it's like air; it's all around us and we breathe it in and out... like when we boil water and you see the steam coming up, that's the water changing into a gas... They seemed to grasp the basics but changes of state is now a topic I want to cover soon with them, insha'Allah!) but they seemed to get the idea of it.

To help demonstrate, I took out a box of matches (quick recap on fire safety with them). When I hit the match head against the box, it made fire: heat and light. A similar thing is happening inside a star, except lots and lots of tiny reactions are happening all at the same time. (The girls then had fun taking it in turns to blow out the matches I struck 😂)

Stars grow old and die when all the nuclear reactions are finished - similar to the matches, once it's been used, can it be used again? No! (We tried one to make sure!) So one day the sun will burn out, too... When? Scientists have predicted it to happen a long long long time after our lifetimes (billions of years from now!). The book we were reading explained what would happen to the Earth if there was no more sun - everything would die because it would be too cold - so I asked the girls if they wanted to be alive to see that happen... One said yes, the other said no! Then the conversation moved to talking about the Day of Judgement, because maybe that would happen before the sun burnt out anyway; only Allah knows.

What's the difference between an asteroid and a comet? What is a meteor?

We read through this brilliant find from the library: Our Solar System - Asteroids, Comets and Meteors to learn about these smaller objects found in space. After reading it together, taking it in turns to read paragraphs, captions and fact boxes, I wrote the keywords on the whiteboard: asteroids, comets, meteors, meteoroids, meteorite. Then I asked the girls to tell me what each one meant, i.e. give a definition. If they couldn't remember exactly, what could they do? M said to look in the glossary. 👌 And if they wanted even more detail? She said they could just go back and read the pages in the book again!

So the definitions we came up with were:

asteroid: made from rock and metal; orbits the sun
comet: made from rock, dust and ice; orbits the sun
meteoroid: piece of asteroid or comet
meteor: the streak of light made by a meteoroid burning up in the Earth's atmosphere
meteorite: a meteoroid when it hits the Earth

I learnt something new, too, as I didn't know the difference between any of them! Then I made a simple diagram of this information for them to fill in the blanks as a worksheet.

You can download our worksheet here.

The purpose of this exercise was to highlight how useful diagrams can be as opposed to blocks of text, rather than getting them to memorise the definitions for asteroid/comet/meteoroid/etc.

Why are diagrams useful? Because pictures can help us understand things quicker and/or easier! Which kind of fact book would they prefer to read: one with diagrams or one without? Why? Then I asked them to find me an example of an effective diagram (one which they liked because it was clear and helped them to understand something easily) from one of the non-fiction books we had taken out from the library.

Finally, we followed the instructions in the back of the book to make our own comets from foil and ribbon. Z made one too, with my help. After they threw them around a bit, I got them to climb onto the sofa (climb into space!) and throw their comets down to try and hit a cushion on the floor. Whenever they got a hit, we all cheered, "You made a crater!" - to reinforce that the impact from a meteoroid hitting the Earth makes a big dent in the ground. 😁

Later on, I found them throwing their comets down the stairs. 😂