Hello and welcome to Virtual Kids Create! This is a self-paced version of the monthly kids day we host at the Poetry Center and includes age-appropriate language arts workshops for children from infancy to ten-years-old, developed by our incredible facilitators. September's theme is metaphors! The activities include read- and sing-a-longs, exercises for early and middle elementary students. Feel free to use this as a guide to create your own at-home, structured Kids Create, or pick and choose activities you think the kids in your household might enjoy.
Infant to 3-year-old read-a-loud & sing-a-long:
In this video, Kids Create facilitator Kathy Sutton reads four books: You Are My I Love You, I'm As Quick as a Cricket, A Treasury of Ten Tiny Tales, and Water Can Be ...:
When you're done, enjoy this sing-a-long with musician and teacher Gabrielle Pietrangelo. It includes the songs "This Old Man" and "Frére Jacques," as well as a reading of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar:
4-6-year-old writing workshop: Metaphors from the World Around Us
In this writing prompt, facilitator Sophie Daws invites young poets to make metaphors out of objects found outside. Writers are asked to utilize their five senses, and then expand the comparison into a poem. Daws includes this example from Poetry Everywhere:
Night is a bear
roaring and going around in circles
chasing ants to gobble them
up.
Anonymous (7th grade)
7-10-year-old writing workshop: Living Metaphors
Young writers get a chance to practice metaphor-making in this exercise by facilitator Chalese "Chay the Poet" Potts. After deciding if they want to write about themselves, their family, or their life, students brainstorm objects to compare their topic to and, after choosing one, use a process of extensions to craft a poem that builds on their initial metaphor.
"My Family is an old tree with many branches and deep roots," Potts writes in the example poem, "Our branches rarely connect with one another, but we drink from the same history, the same sap runs through all of us."