Valentine's Day Activity

A school is a place to celebrate any holiday we can get our hands on. Valentine’s Day lends itself to delving deeply into caring for others and being loved ourselves. Today I worked with my class on understanding Lyric Poems. These are poems that have strong rhyming patterns and have a song-like quality. The poem tells about the feelings and emotions of the author, rather than tell a story.

You have probably guessed by now that the theme for our Lyric Poems was love and caring. I taught my students the basic rules for the poem and we shared a couple of sonnets by William Shakespeare, for example,

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed.”

Once the children had an understanding of the genre, they wrote some drafts and we tweaked and revised until we had something resembling the goal. For some, this came surprising quickly, others may get there eventually. I reiterated several times the importance of demonstrating our feelings about caring for or about others rather than the longings of love an angst ridden teenager might feel. To celebrate our feelings about love and caring, we created a picture on which to present part or all of our poems. The idea was to create Art with a Heart!!

Inspired by a Pinterest picture, I wanted the children to create a piece art that could be framed. I loved the idea of the hand, the child’s own, becoming the stem or trunk, and the hearts being the petals or leaves. I let the children take charge of how they wanted to present their picture and the poem. Some curled the words around the hand, others wrote inside the hearts. Each piece was a unique gift for the family with treasured feelings straight from the heart!

My original inspiration: