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Poetry Rocks!

© Beverley Paine

As it's National Poetry Week I thought I'd feature one of my favourite ideas for making poetry fun! The credit for this idea orginally goes to veteran homeschooler Linda Dobson.

Gather a few dozen smooth, rounded river stones. Clean them if needed. Paint them dark colours and then with a light felt tip pen or white out pen, write single words on each: he, she, you, river, glistening, fire; you get the gist. Include some full stops, commas, exclamation marks, and question marks.

Finish each stone with a coat of clear varnish (lacquer). Put the rocks in a clean cardboard box (recycled milk container work well) that has been suitably decorated. You now have poetry rocks that can be arranged into sentences to make up poetry!.

Add more stones to the collection until you have lots of words with which to make sentences or poems. You can also write on the reverse side of the poem, paint the stones different colours to represent verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns and adverbs. With the children, pick a stone at a time from the container and add it to the poem, either as the next word or leaving a space for another stone to fit into. If you can find or buy pebbles then you can use card, but pebbles/stones make it special and interesting for the children.

Another great way to use the word pebbles is to include small objects, like shells or leaves, to represent themselves, within the sentence.

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The information on this website is of a general nature only and is not intended as personal or professional advice. This site merges and incorporates 'Homeschool Australia' and 'Unschool Australia'.

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