Lee Bennett Hopkins’ “Summer Fear”

Reminder: PoetryTagTime is the first ever electronic-only poetry anthology of new poems by top poets for children. You can purchase the book for 99 cents at Amazon and read it on your Kindle or through the downloadable Kindle platform for your computer, cell phone, etc.

Previously: Alice Schertle

Next up: LEE BENNETT HOPKINS

Setting the Stage: Lead a discussion of weather worries. Does thunder make you nervous? Lightning? Invite the kids to consider whether flowers might fear stormy weather, too.

Poetry Performance: Read Lee Bennett Hopkins’s poem, “Summer Fear,” aloud to the group first. Then divide the group into three smaller groups. One will read the three-line stanza about roses, one will read the three-line stanza about pansies, and one will read the three-line stanza about sunflowers. Then everyone joins together to read the final stanza. Practice, read, repeat.

Just for Fun: Not everyone is familiar with the varieties of flowers mentioned in the poem. Research together what roses, pansies, and sunflowers, (and yews) look like. Create a collage of these images adding facial expressions on the flowers, a backdrop of fence posts and a window box, and aluminum foil bolts of thunder to create a scene to accompany the poem.

Poem Links: Here are key words that connect this poem with other poems in the PoetryTagTime collection:
Summer
Flowers
Storm
Fear

Buy the book now, so you can share each poem along with the ideas and activities that follow here.

Next up for PoetryTagTime: Betsy Franco



Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2011. All rights reserved.