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