Some Nature, Some drawing, Some Poetry

"We have lost our sense of time. We believe that we can add meaning to life by making things go faster. We have an idea that life is short — and that we must go fast to fit everything in. But life is long. The problem is that we don't know how to spend our time wisely."-Carlo Petrini: Founder of the Slow Food Movement (September 2008, quoted in the magazine 'Fast Company')

Grade Level: Elementary

Objective: Students will read (and write!) poetry attentively, paying attention to language, imagery, and the poetic devices poets use.

Today we:
-Read "Luna Moth" by J. Patrick Lewis and "Invention" by Billy Collins (I read the poems out loud twice, the first reading students closed their eyes and imagined the images in the poem, the second reading students looked at the poem as I read, picking out words and phrases they particularly enjoyed)
-Created a venn diagram comparing and contrasting the poems
-Created artwork for the poems
-Wrote our own poems inspired by objects in our Nature Discovery Center