Advent Poetry Teatime Resources

Adding a poetry teatime to your week is such a lovely way to add some beauty to your week. We always like to find our favorite seasonal Holiday teas. We especially love Celestial Seasonings Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride and Sugar Plum Spice at Christmas. I baked some cranberry bread from our leftover cranberry orange relish from Thanksgiving. Score for frugality! We carried our advent wreath out to the porch to enjoy a bit of sunshine.

For our special advent tea, I checked out all the Christmas poetry books at our library to find some that included religious poetry that I liked. My favorite was The Young Oxford Book of Christmas Poetry.

I also read from A Christmas Anthology of Poetry and Painting edited by Vivian Campbell, a vintage book my husband found at a used bookstore. We have been talking about the Renaissance lately, and this volume had lots of pictures of Renaissance art.

He also bought me a copy of poet Malcolm Guite's poetry anthology Waiting on the Word. Malcolm Guite is a British vicar, poet, musician and C.S. Lewis scholar, who also happens to look and sound an awful lot like a Hobbit. In this advent devotional, he has collected a poem a day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. He is also posting each poem on his blog during advent with a link to him reading it and artwork by Linda Richardson.

If you don't have time to track down these books, you can also find some wonderful poetry each day as part of the The Advent Project at Biola University. 

I have been loving this online advent calendar for my own personal devotions. Each day a new square pops up with a piece of artwork or video, a musical selection, a Bible reading, a piece of poetry, and a devotion. I have been sharing bits of this with the kids as well and they love it.

It was through The Advent Project on December 1 that we discovered this wonderful poem by our local, world-famous poet, and also Amherst College-alum, Richard Wilbur, called The Christmas Hymn. You can hear him read it here.

Enjoy some tea and poetry this advent!

Five in a Row: Down, Down the Mountain 2016

This year I didn't spend time in the summer planning out a schedule for which Five in a Row books we would do, but instead I've just been choosing the books as inspiration strikes. In the Fall, I always like to study one book about Appalachian culture before we make our annual Thanksgiving trip to my home-place in West Virginia. There are several Appalachian books, which you can choose from in the Five in a Row curriculum, which is awesome.

During our impromptu Fall Break, there was one day that was predicted to be in the 70s, so my friend and I decided to plan a hike up Mt. Sugarloaf. We are novices at hiking, but we had a wonderful time climbing a mountain in shorts and t-shirts on a glorious Fall day. We made it all the way to the top!The fall foliage was at peak and the view was fantastic. 

 

After the hike, we picked up our farm share and the kids couldn't resist  picking up two giant turnips. My four-year-old son is obsessed with turnips. He thinks they are the funniest things due to these two books:

 I bet you didn't even know books involving turnip humor were a thing! 

That night at dinner, as we were eating our beans and cornbread. I laughed and said, "Hey guys, we went down, down the mountain today. We picked up turnips and we're eating Appalachian food. I think I know our next book..."

We rowed Down, Down the Mountain two years ago and had a lot of fun with it. It's a wonderful story about two siblings: Hetty and Hank, who work hard planting a turnip field to buy themselves pairs of shoes. On the way to sell their turnips, they are generous with everyone they meet, giving away all of their turnips. They have only one turnip left, but they decide to enter it in the County Fair. They win and have enough money to buy their creaky-squeaky shoes and gifts for their family.

We began the week with art. We listened to all the details in the story and drew pictures of the inside of Hetty and Hank's cabin.

On Ella's birthday that Monday, we had gone to Old Sturbridge Village, a 1830s historic New England village. It is one of our favorite places, and it tied in really well with our discussion of log cabins, as many of the houses had dried apples, herbs, and hams hanging from their rafters just like in the book. Ella had just received a new Lego set for her birthday, so we spent the rest of the morning building a cabin. 

 

I don't think there was a moose in the Blue Ridge mountains, but that's okay!

For Social Studies, we learned about Appalachian culture. I told the kids stories I knew about my grandparents and great-aunts and uncles making molasses, washing their clothes at the creek, and making lye soap in a kettle outside. We also watched several educational videos from KET. They have a wonderful series called Old Music for New Ears that features folk performers like Jeanne Ritchie, Mike Seeger, and Odetta singing traditional Appalachian, blues, gospel, and Native American songs. This week we watched Bob and Susie Hutchison singing and playing lap dulcimer. We also watched KET's show Telling Tales, which features Appalachian storytelling. We enjoyed Jack and the Magic Mill and Ashpet: the Appalachian Cinderella.

We had an Appalachian-inspired poetry. Earlier in the week, we had planned a fun day to make fried apple pies with our friends, but several of us were laid low by a cold. We had made all the pies ahead of time, so we baked them up and had apple pies all week. It was perfect for our Appalachian tea along with apple cider and some wonderful poetry from Louise McNeill's memoir The Milkweed Ladies. Louise McNeill grew up in the county in West Virginia where I grew up and later became the West Virginia State Poet Laureate. This memoir is written in verse about life in Appalachia on a small farm before industrialization.

We also read from another favorite poet of mine: Wendell Berry. We read from his books The Timber Choir and Farming: A Handbook. We decorated with this beautiful basket made by  Jessie Martin, an elderly mountain woman who I knew in eastern Kentucky. She was a true mountain woman who knew all about all of the plants and herbs to be found in the forests. I was very blessed to get to talk with her and my mom bought me this basket she made for Christmas a few years ago.

 

For science, we studied mountains, and did the Mystery Science Lesson: Will a Mountain Last Forever? Word to the wise, if you have a terrible headache, it is not wise to do a science lesson that involves shaking sugar cubes in little containers. But on our next hike, my four-year-old was able to identify a rock fall, so there is that.

For the grand finale of our week, and our language arts activity, we acted out the book. The kids had a ball!

Hetty and Hank were so sad that they didn't have shoes. 

So Granny told them they should plant some turnips.

   

They took their turnips down, down the mountain to sell them at the store. 

They gave some turnips to a man who was cutting sugar cane and to a woman who was making soap. When they got to the store, they only had one giant turnip so they couldn't buy their shoes.

They took their turnip to the County Fair.

The judge chose their turnip as the best of all! They won a Five-dollar gold piece!

Hetty and Hank were so happy. They were able to buy their creaky-squeaky shoes! 

Five in a Row: Pumpkin Runner

 

October is always a crazy month for our family with three family birthdays spread out over the month. Most years, school falls apart this month, but I'm glad to say that we actually were able to mostly stay on track. Well, math may have been a little neglected, but we had some good learning experiences, so I'm glad. Part of staying sane also meant taking a week off while my husband was in California on business and the weather was in the 70s. I feel like we actually got to enjoy Fall. Good thing because it snowed the next week.

We started the month off with a book we had not yet read, The Pumpkin Runner by Marsha Diane Arnold. The lessons for this book are in Volume 4 of Five in a Row. Volume 4 is intended for use with slightly older kids, so the lessons stretch over two weeks. We loved this book about an Australian sheep farmer named Joshua Summerhayes who decides to enter an ultra-marathon race from Melbourne to Sydney. He shows up in gumboots and overalls and eats pumpkins for energy food. The other runners laugh at him and even try to cheat, but Joshua Summerhayes wins the race and ends up splitting the prize money with the other runners. The coolest thing about this book is that it's based on a true story about a man named Cliff Young, who was a 61-year-old farmer in Australia who broke the world record in an ultra-marathon race by almost two days.

We started off our week by visiting our friends for a fun day to celebrate Fall. We really wanted to meet their two new sheep on their farm. My friend had planned some fun events like scavenger hunts, poetry and apples with caramel. Unfortunately, in the middle of the day, she started feeling very sick and exhausted, so I took over.

We shared the pumpkin bread Ella had made for a snack, and read them the book Pumpkin Runner. I've never seen a group of kids so enthusiastic about a picture book. They had so many questions about sheep and running and Australia. Being from a farming family, they loved that it was based on a true story about a farmer. Afterward, they immediately decided, "Let's have races!" So we did: one where they had to shuffle along like Joshua Summerhayes/ Cliff Young and one where they were actually running.

After our fun day with our friends, we spent the next day learning about pumpkins for science. We used another Mystery Science lesson: How could you make the biggest fruit in the world?  The lesson was about selecting for growing bigger vegetables, and had a fun activity about sorting and grouping fruits and vegetables by their leaves, flowers, and the appearance of the fruit inside. The kids have big plans to grow a giant pumpkin, once we have the space.

 

We also made a collage of our favorite pumpkins and gourds from the Baker Creek Rare Seeds catalog. Bonus: we learned about Jere Gettle, the founder of Baker Creek seeds, who was a homeschooler, who loved to garden and save seeds. He started his company when he was just 17.

Thursday was our day for poetry tea. We had pumpkin spice tea. A friend of mine had told me about a treat they have in Australia called Fairy Bread, which is bread with butter and sprinkles.We are very pro-sprinkles in our house, so we had to try it. Very yummy!

 

Since we were having  Fairy Bread, the kids thought they should dress up a bit.

We read from a favorite poetry book: The Complete Book of Flower Fairies by Cicely Mary Barker. The book features beautiful illustrations of fairies. Each one is based on a different flower, plant, or bush. They each have a poem to go with them. There are books of Flower Fairies for each season, so we read the Autumn fairies.

On Saturday, we went apple-picking for my husband's birthday, and guess what we found? A pumpkin patch! 

This book was a great opportunity to learn about a new continent for us: Australia. We looked up Australia on the globe and also found the Equator, Prime Meridian, and Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. We discussed the fact that the seasons were opposite in Australia, and read several non-fiction books about Australia, Australian animals, and the Coral Reef from the library. We also read about Cliff Young, and watched news videos about him.

For our second science lesson, we learned about the muscles and bones in your body and how they work. We used another Mystery Science lesson called Why do your biceps bulge? The kids were fascinated when the video showed the teacher pulling the tendons on a chicken foot. We really enjoyed the activity, which included making a paper model of a robotic finger. With string and paper clips, the finger would actually move when you pulled on the string.

The art lesson for the week was on perspective and how a painting can change depending on your point of your point of view. So we went on a walk.One of my sadnesses in not being able to sell our house this summer, is that the kids really want trees, especially trees they can climb. We don't have any trees, except a maple by the street in front of our house with no low branches. A few streets over from our house there is an avenue with a long tree belt in the middle. We often have walked there to pick up pretty leaves in Fall. This year, we discovered that it was just packed with good climbing trees. Each kid has picked out a favorite tree, and it's our new favorite playground. So we decided to get a new perspective on our art. We brought along our nature journals and we drew in the trees.

I also snapped some photos to show how you can draw a picture that looks more 3-D by making the trees near you large and the trees farther away smaller. The Five in a Row manual had a lesson on this using toys, which we did using our Star Wars figures. This led to Mabel's masterpiece: Wookies in Perspective.

Snow, Tea, and Poetry

We are buried under snow here with crazy windchills. So we are fighting winter with a lot of tea and poetry. I mentioned in my last post that we have instituted a weekly Poetry Tea Time inspired by the Brave Writer curriculum. It has quickly become a favorite part of our week. We have some special tea party treats and read poetry. Of course, in our house, no tea party would be complete without dressing up.

 

One of our favorite days was when Daddy got a snowday from work. When Daddy is home from work,he makes us yummy treats like homemade orange cinnamon rolls. Since we were doing a Five in a Row unit on Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost, we read from several books of Robert Frost's poetry.

That week, we also tried writing some poetry using the rhyme scheme from Frost's poem. The kids liked it so much, they decided to publish their poems in a binder. I wrote them out for them, and they illustrated. Now we have poems that they can read at our teas too. 

  
Our next week, we were reading Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say, and decided to learn about haiku. That required some new school supplies purchased at an Asian market. We love our new Chinese tea set and Pocky! Yum!  The kids really liked writing haiku and we read those, alongside some by the haiku master Basho.We brought out our kimonos from our Japanese tea party last year, though I didn't manage any good pictures this year. 

Want to try a poetry tea time with your family? Here are some of our favorite poetry books for kids:
The Poetry for Young People series of books are beautifully illustrated collections of famous poets' works. We have Robert Frost, Emily Dickenson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I hope to purchase more of these lovely collections.
A Swinger of Birches: Poems of Robert Frost for Young People 
Books by Shel Silverstein: Falling Up, A Light in the Attic, Where the Sidewalk Ends
The Random House Book of Poetry for Children
Psalms
Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost, illustrated by Susan Jeffers