Our handful of awesome Spring Break programs kicked off today, the results more funtastic than imaginable. The morning began with Create a Kingdom, allowing our young friends to collaboratively dream up an alternate reality where candy is abundant and sisters are nice. The verses transcended into the visual realm, exploding in vivid and wild colours, fusing silliness and ultimate truths about what we really value in life. Below is the poem, followed by the sample work.
Our Island
by Charlotte, Katie, Madeleine and Shauna
On our island the earth is the sky
and the sky is the ground.
Everyone falls asleep on a soft, puffy cloud,
softer than cushions.
There is no bedtime.
On our island
there is no guacamole or avocado.
Everyone can eat candy for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
They also eat candy for snack at school.
At school, kids learn about candy
and candy math and candy toys.
At the end of the day they win candy medals
for being so good at school.
The whole island is a park
and kids can play there.
They play tag and hide-and-go-seek.
Everyone has a sister who is fun and nice and cute.
Each kid’s sister only always wants to play
the games her sister wants to play.
Downtown there are three piles.
One is candy, one is oranges,
one is every kind of dessert in the world.
The snow on the island is ice cream,
the rain is gum balls,
For fun, people jump on trampolines
and slide off their roofs.
Adults on the island wish for peacocks.
They can’t speak, so they have to
make squeaking noises to be understood.
The adults are always busy
jumping on the kids’ beds,
even if it is a bunkbed.
They bonk heads on the wall
and the ceiling.
There is only one rule: be good to everyone.
Sample piece featuring favourite components of the poem
In the afternoon, imagination took flight once more as we investigated coastal birds and paper-folding in Poet-gami. Sharing many stories of bird related encounters, we concluded that Swans are terrifying and the Bird of Paradise featured on Planet Earth is astounding and hilarious. We folded up our list upon lists of bird words into crisp vellum cranes to be suspended in a mobile. The results were pretty breath-taking.
Winged verses
Poetry takes flight
Have we ever told you how much we love Jackie? Whenever her name gets mentioned around the Lyceum Christianne says, “I love Jackie. She’s the bees knees.” Jackie volunteers every Saturday for our Left to Writers and Story Catchers II – offering superb editorial advice and a quiet encouragement. She’s also a wonderful writer in her own right – every once and a while she drops by our Author’s Night Out sessions and blows us away with the latest chapter in her memoir about her time as a teen model in Japan.
