Christine Hume Visits

Christine Hume, mom of darling Juna in Elaine's class, came to visit us today for a poetry workshop. This is in preparation for a performance by Christian Bok tomorrow.

Using A Voweller's Bestiary, a collection of short poems that uses only the vowels in the name of the animal to compose poems about them, Christine led the kids through an exercise where they picked out an animal and then generated a pool of words with only the vowels in the name of the animal. We picked CAT - and then came up with words like bad, sad, Platt, aardvark, etc. Pairs of children worked together to come up with a line or two of a poem.

Then Christine introduced them to sound poetry or poetry made of pure sounds that don't have referential meaning--something between music and language or "poetry without words." If you click the highlighted words, you will hear Bok reading Sea Horses and Flying Fish, an example of sound poetry that the children LOVED this morning.