Last Day of Elm Tree Poetry, Week 2: Brooklyn Museum, Identity, Similes & Playground

Dear Elm Tree fams & fans in faraway lands,

We'd like to start our final post by saying how much we've enjoyed working with your children this week. We are sad to see this awesome group part ways, but also excited about the future of Elm Tree Poetry. 

Today was our last day of Elm Tree and, of course, in the spirit of endings, our moving "classroom"--our blue wagon--gave in toward the beginning of the day. Oh no! :( One of the wheels lost its temper, but the Elm Tree kiddos were good sports and waited while Sally & Romy figured out a way to make it to the Brooklyn museum and back. We all worked together...woohoo! We realized we never named our wagon, but let's say thank you and so long to Bluely or Creaken-station or Wagon Lagoon Moon that left us too soon, and hello to a brand new slightly more sturdy wagon for next summer.

We started the day playing hide-and-seek and searching for insects in the "backwoods" of Prospect Park as usual, and then met for our morning meeting. We played the "Many Headed Expert" and wrote another very silly one-word-at-a-time collaborative story:

Turtles do their homework and some turtles don't do it correctly or their mommies don't swim in the water. There's a giant monster and a turtle friend. So the egg quacked on the ground. Ahhhh! Rawr! Then the baby flew across a mountain hole of quick and monster wah! bah! THE bah! END. 

Then we moved to "the island" to play a rhythm game. We started off with a rhythm and the kiddos followed our beat. Some children took over and created their own beats for their friends to practice imitating. Our intention was to introduce the concept of integrating rhythm within our future poems.

During snack time, Sally read us poems from My Hippo Has the Hiccups by Kenn Nesbitt. We read "I'm a Wizard, I'm a Warlock," When Vegetables Are Angry," "Wally Wards the Sword Swallower," "Mirror, Mirror," and more!

As we were about to head off to the Brooklyn museum, our wagon broke and your children were super duper helpers: they searched for the missing bolt and waited patiently while Sally and Romy figured out a missing bolt alternative. We made it work, but this is how we felt about the situation (not too grumpy...ha!):

We finally made it to the Brooklyn museum and visited Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks exhibit. We checked out all of his old composition notebooks and noticed that they looked a lot like ours (!). Then we moved freely around the exhibit and watched a section of an interview of Basquiat, saw clips of him doing graffiti, and speaking about his work and exhibitions. The children saw that he was rushing and asked if graffiti is allowed. Wynnifred asked "Is he bad?" Sally quickly jumped in and said this art was his form of protesting issues of race, class and helping to make people more aware of our history. They all seemed to agree that that was "good." So sweet!

We passed through the The Rise of Sneaker Culture exhibit:

Then we visited the arcade in the FAILE exhibit and your children did not want to leave! They had a blast. It's incredibly fun and educational in many ways. For example, there are games about gentrification and global warming. 

We also went into an installation: the FAILE Temple.

Lunch in the cafe courtyard!

After our Brooklyn Museum adventure, we walked back to Mount Prospect Park for a reading and writing exercise. We read "My Name," from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. In this story, she uses similes and metaphors to discuss the many meanings of her name, which the Elm Tree children decided was really a way of talking about herself. One of our favorite metaphors occurs early in the story when she says her name is like "the Mexican records my father listens to on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing." 

We talked about how she uses color to describe her name, how she talks about her family, and how she explains that she doesn't like the way some people mispronounce her name (Esperanza... ask your children to pronounce it!). We brainstormed different qualities about our names and ourselves to use in our own poems. 

In order to practice our simile writing skills, we compared our parents and fams to animals. Sadly, we lost the recording, but we remember a few of the children's comparisons.

Wynnifred: My uncle is a yeti. My dad is a gorilla, and so am I.
Esmee: My dad is a bear, and my mom is an eagle.
Lyla: My mom is a parrot, and my dad is a bear too.
Hector: My dad is an elephant, and my mom is a parrot too.

Below you'll find photos of the Elm Tree kiddos at work/ their writing and art:

By Hector

By Lyla

By Wynnifred

By Miriam

When we finished writing, we put on our swim suits and sunscreen and ran to the playground for our last activity of the day. The children found the jungle gym equipment more enticing than the sprinklers!

Thank you again for an incredible week of poetry writing in nature. We will miss you all!

<3 always, Romy & Sally

Day Four: The Wish Machine

Dear Elm Tree Poetry dreamers and schemers, 

Your children have wowed us with their poetic abilities. Sally and I plan on borrowing some of their similes for our own poems. Today we talked a bit about the act of appropriation in poetry and how we poets often share our lines. We emphasized the importance of giving poets credit for their original works!

In the morning, we spent some time in the forested area as usual...NYC kiddos need to run free, and they love it! Also, often our best writing ideas come from making observations in solo spaces and places. 

Another fave Elm Tree pastime is meeting all the dogs that are walking through the park. The kiddos know to always ask the dogs' owners before petting and hugging and loving them <3. 

After meeting these cute pups, Romy & Sally called our morning meeting, and we hiked back to our tree for a little movement and oral poetry writing. To help us write an oral poem, we played a game called, "Many-Headed Expert," where each child continues the poem or story by adding one word at a time. Here's a transcription of our collaborative writing: 

Libraries are fun when libraries eat nothing. A lioness was reading quietly when Cockroach floated on the clouds. The cow was floating in the air once he falled because he slipped and bonked his head. Then ice drank the water. Suddenly another cow came into a barn. Barns were running with a new chicken inside. THE END.

Next we reviewed similes. The kiddos know them as comparisons using "like" or "as," and they find them incredibly amusing and silly.  The children compared the glass building to a rainbow, a dog to a wolf, an arch to a castle, a blinking light to ice, a sparkly shirt to the sun, tree bark to a rocky mountain range. This week, we taught the children to be specific and regularly encouraged them to include as much detail possible in their writing and thinking. For example, instead of using the phrase, "the sun is yellow," we ask them to mention all the colors they see in the sun, and the phrase becomes, "the sun is yellow and orange and sometimes purple, and we see it reflected in windows and puddles." 

Similes helped us work up an appetite, and we decided to eat on a new grassy patch. Today's snack spot sits on a small and shady hill across the sidewalk from where we usually eat. We left the cart near the bottom of the hill, and Hector continued the simile game,

exclaiming, "This (the grassy patch) is like an island, and the cart is floating away!" As we ate snack, we noticed Romy's friend Natalie Weiss setting up for Baby DJ School under our morning meeting tree! It piqued the kiddos interest, 

and they all wandered over to check it out. 

Since Natalie had a small group, she invited us to join! We didn't want to turn down such an awesome, musical opportunity, so we climbed onto her giant tarp where she taught us about her music equipment, let us play with her cymbals and noisemaker, and helped us recite poetry over beats. Romy and Sally loved the experience, and so did your children! If you'd like more information on Baby DJ School, check out Natalie's website at babydjschool.com. She's available for parties and classes, and her activities are developmentally appropriate for all ages! 

After Baby DJ School, we decided to get out of the elements for a while and check out the library. The super observant Elm Tree crew noticed the gold-plated entrance art immediately and started to discuss the different mythic characters and animals present. Inside, we headed to the children's section where they looked at books about gerbils, scooters, super heroes, magical creatures, and Halloween. Romy read us a book called, The Quilt by Ann Jones. In The Quilt, a "lovie" named Sally (!) is made from quilt material. She gets lost, and readers search for her in the book's pages. 

Once we each chose two books, we made our way to check out. On the way, we introduced ourselves to the librarian, Lisa, to ask about her job in the library. She told us she helps people find books and loves it when people say hi. We also discovered that her grandmother's name is Wynnifred, and her sister's is Miriam! 

Leaving the library, we noticed our grumbling stomachs and decided to eat lunch at Mount Prospect Park again where we found a new tree under which to relax. As we ate, we talked a little about wishes, and asked the students to each share one of their own with

the group. Then we looked at a few "Wish Poems" written by other children. When we asked them what they remembered best from the poem, the all repeated the last line, "I wish I were the sun and the moon." This led into a discussion about the importance of last lines and endings, since that's what readers usually remember. To warm up for individual poems, we wrote an oral, collaborative wish poem, transcribed below:

I wish that I could have a pegasus.
I wish that I can have a dog. Like my mom said I could have a dog and a cat, a dog in Jamaica and a cat at my home. 
I wish I had a friend mermaid.
I wish I could fly.
I wish that I was the sun.
I wish that I lived in Antarctica under the ice.
I wish that I lived in Costa Rica in a tree house.
I wish that I were a porcupine.

As we wrote our collaborative "Wish Poem," we realized we didn't have enough time for the Elm Tree crew to write their own wish poems and visit the Brooklyn Museum. We put our options to a vote, and the children decided they would rather write their own wish poems and have a longer visit at the Brooklyn Museum on the last day of Elm Tree. With that settled, we got to work. Below photos of your children working on their wish poems followed by photos of their work:

By Hector

By Lyla

By Esmee

By Miriam

By Ulysses

By Wynnifred

See you tomorrow for the last day of Elm Tree Poetry: Week Two. We have loved getting to know and working with your children. 

<3 Sally & Romy