National Poetry Month Resources

April is National Poetry Month. I forgot about it until I read Becky's blog post about it. Thanks for the reminder, Becky, and for pointing me to some resources.

Here are some resources that I found in the order that I found them:

The GottaBook Blog is hosting a special 30 Poets/30 Days feature for April. Every day in April he will be posting a previously unpublished poem by a different poet and he provides a list of the participating poets on his blog. Sounds like something worth checking out. I haven't jumped on the Twitter wagon yet but if you have apparently you can following the 20poets30day on Twitter. The blog features mostly children's literature so I'm thinking these will be poems suitable for children.

On The League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Month Blog 2009 different League member's work will be featured each day during the month of April. I think this is more for adults. Unfortunately this is the only Canadian source that I could find.

Coloring and activities, craft ideas, and lesson plans from Crayola Calendar

The Academy of American Poets has a National Poetry Month page.
They offer a number of resources for poems to read. I signed up for their "poem a day" email. Their Great Poems to Teach page has a list, along with complete text of, 341 poems taught successfully in highschool classes. The Animated Text Flow Poems page has over 50 poems in flash animation.
They also offer a number of resources to help in writing poems. The NaPoWriMo Pledge Drive page challeges you to write and post a poem each day in April, they even have a board where you can post your poems, whether you participate in the pledge drive or not. In the Poet's Workshop there are three poem writing ideas: Poems Based on Works of Art, Give Chance a Chance, Unexpected Odes. The challenges are more fulling explained in the "Post and Workshop" message board posts so be sure to click through to check it out.

While reading The Academy of American Poets
Poem in Your Pocket Day page I thought about the PocketMod site I recently found and how it would work great for this. It gives instruction on how to fold a single sheet of paper into a 6 page mini booklet that will fit in your pocket. They even have a widget that you can use to design your booklet and you could use the custom page under the personal tab to type in a poem or poems you want to use.

I learned about the RePoWriMo (Refrigerator Poetry Writing Month) Blog through the boards on the Academy of American Poets site. The challenge it to write a poem a day using poetry magnets. If you don't have any you could always make your own or you can use the Online Magnetic Poetry site or the Shadow Poetry's Magnetic Word Poetry site.

The English Room's 30 Days of Poetry site is a couple of years old but the suggestions are still great. It offers 30 Days of ooetry writing ideas especially geared to middle and high school students.

On The Rubber Stamping Blog is a challenge to use poems on/in homemade cards, and for those that think poems must rhyme there is a link to Rhyme Zone for rhyming help. This is a really neat, fun tool for finding words that rhyme with your chosen word.

I have decided to make a special National Poetry Month blog for Canadian Home Educating bloggers. It is a place to share poems you or your children have read and also poems you or your children have written.

Inspired by the Academy of American Poets Poetry Read-a-thon idea, I am inviting Homeschooling Canadian bloggers to use the blog to serve as a master log to record and share the lists of poems they read during the month. You can also use the journaling prompt suggestions on the Poetry Read-a-thon to journal about the poems. Use power point or some such program to turn one of your favorite poems into an Animated Text Flow Poem or create and share a Free Verse Project using lines from your favorite poem.

Inspired by the NaPoWriMo Pledge Drive page I am inviting Homeschooling Canadian bloggers to use the blog to share poems that they write during April.

Wow! I didn't realize...

...it's been over a month since I posted here! Life has been crazy. I feel like the whole month of February was just a big blur.

I've been wanting to blog but not really sure what I wanted to say. Still feeling that way, actually. There's so much I want to share but I don't know where to start so I decided to finally just start and see what happens.

A year from the day he was diagnosed with cancer, FIL recieved his promotion to heaven. It was a day of mixed emotions - sadness because our time with him on earth had ended, relief that he was no longer suffering, and happiness that he was now walking the streets of gold.

The past year has been a stressful time for my family in many ways, but it's also been a time of growth. I hope we can hold on to the lessons we learned and continue to grow.

Anyway, I needed to get that off my chest before I could start posting about other things. I'm hoping to get back into posting more regularly but we'll have to wait and see if that actually happens or not.