Poetry time

One of the aspects in life that I have been waiting for my kids to get old enough to do has been poetry. In my early school years it held a deep place in my heart. Poetry, free writing, etc etc. So naturally I could not wait for the kids to be old enough to appreciate it themselves. With this said over the last decade I went back and analyzed my own time and realized that poetry helped me to get through the horrid teen years. Come the married years, I was just too busy to sit and write anything at all. Yes, I tried the journal thing and that never panned out... and this leads to today. Now I am slowly getting back into blogging and it brings back all those emotions I would experience when creating my own poetry. Writing means a lot to me and therefore I would hope would one day mean a lot to my children.
Today one of the worksheets my daughter had was about Haiku. Now she read and reread the assignment and then came to me begging to skip that section. I was just heartbroken. I had to really catch my breath.. I could not believe my kid would not want to do a poem. Then I read her assignment and it occurred to me.. it's not the poetry that was bothering her..hahahah it was the writing. She had to write her poem down. She absolutely hates writing it has taken her a long time to be comfortable with writing anything at all... let alone something from her own head.

So we did an oral practice and got her laughing instead of crying. Made her realize that it was not as hard as it seemed... and the whole point of the assignment in the end had nothing to do with poetry... it was all about if she understood how to use syllables. When we stepped back and talked about why she was doing the haiku and what the other pages were like, then she agreed it was actually an easy page. Plus she would get to draw her picture afterward, so that was good encouragement. And left on her own to finish with a topic about weather... here is her first poem..

Clouds are gray and white.
They are going to bring rain.
The Earth is happy.

This was inspired by our storm today... her prediction from the clouds.. and she was right it would rain, and it did. After all the stress she smiled and read her poem with pride. A writer is born! Yeah there is still hope after all. I just keep telling myself be patient... everything in its own time!