Days of You and Me: Day 15, Poetry

However little faith, or perhaps, however great my doubt at the idea of composing poetry with a toddler may have been, I have, to my good fortune, been proven wrong.  Annabelle, and likely all of our little ones, are quite capable of making words come to life . . . all we need to do is listen.

To compose poetry with my toddler, first we read a bit.  During a weekly library visit, Annabelle and I plopped down on the floor of the children’s poetry aisle and began to sift through books.  We’d open books of poetry to random pages, sit, read, and talk about what the poem was talking about.   The sound, er repetition of sounds, throughout many of the sing-songy poems was, and I am guessing a bit, attractive to Annabelle’s ear.  “More!” she’d say as we closed one book and turned to another.  Reading poetry with my wee one was easy peasy. But, I wondered, how easy would it be for us to write poetry together . . .

Since we find ourselves in the middle of summer, I thought that writing about our summer might be a good idea.  I gathered colored construction paper, Annabelle’s dot markers, a sharpie, and a storybook about pioneer summer activities (which I hoped would inspire our summer poetry).

I asked Annabelle what she liked about summer.  Then I listed our ideas on the construction paper, just jotting down words and phrases.

As part of our poetry storming, she and I paged through books of poetry.  We jotted down more words and phrases.

Annabelle tucked herself into my lap.  She told me, “I like stories.  Let’s read another.”

As she listened, she asked for the sharpie so that she too could “draw.”

And now and again, and I think this might be the secret to writing good poetry, she’d stretch herself out onto the bed, letting her body hover over the poetry, crumpling our papers, and well, making me laugh.

Being the “writerly” mamma that I am, I looked for those words and phrases that stood out to me (and that might also be easy to ryhme) and put together couplets of sorts.  Together, she and I, made up sentences, or lines of poetry, that ended with each word of the couplet.  I transfered our poem to fresh paper, drew a few images from the poem, and asked Annabelle to use her dot markers to give a little more flair to our poem.

And just in case it’s not so easy to read as pictured above, the text to our poem “Summer” is:

When summer gets startin’

I like pickles from the garden,

Buzz, buzz, buzz bees,

Leaves, leaves, leaves trees,

Green pop-si-pop,

Dot-to-dot, hop-si-hop,

Hold Daddy’s hand and walk over shells,

“Sun! Sun! Sun!” Annabelle yells.

To the fountain we will walk,

where Annabelle and Mommy talk, talk, talk,

Summer look-ies,

I like cookies,

What I like about summer is

life isn’t such a bummer,

and . . .

all day long

we’ll play ball.