Stopping by Woods…
This is the FIAR book we’ve been doing for the last week or so.
Before we began reading the book we’d been for a walk over the Christmas holidays and spotted deer hoof prints in the sand in the woods around Sandringham. We made plaster of Paris casts of them and M has painted them up - they look really nice now.
Wednesday
We read the poem together and talked about the basic story of the poem and the illustrations. M picked 4 British woodland creatures to read about and then draw or colour and narrate a few sentences about. I cut out some bunny shapes to stick the animals to to make a booklet to keep the info together. M started writing out the poem for handwriting practice. He can write beautifully with tiny letters when he concentrates. In the afternoon M watched birds in our garden and drew some pictures of them, using a form from this booklet, which I liked because it has a bird shape to fill in rather than having to draw from scratch, which I thought would be too daunting.
Thursday
The main focus today was on art. We read through the book and looked more closely at the illustrations and M tried to work out from whose perspective each picture was drawn - was it another person looking on, a bird looking down from a tree branch, a small animal looking through the bushes? He took drawing things out into the back garden and sat close to the base of our bird feeder pole, looking up at it. He took a photo and drew a picture of the feeder from a “rabbit’s eye view”.Then when he’d finished he came upstairs and looked out of the bedroom window down onto the feeder, took another photo and drew the bird feeder from a “bird’s eye view”.
We finished off with M writing out the next 4 lines of the poem for handwriting practice and then looking at the arrangement of rhyming words through the poem. If you label each line A, B etc giving a new letter to each different rhyming word at the end, you can see the pattern. In this poem it goes A A B A (know, though, here, snow) and then the B from the first verse is the rhyme of the As in the second verse (here rhymes with queer, near etc) and so on.
Friday
Today we looked mostly at poetry related things. We read poems from several poetry books we have, looking for ones we liked. For some we looked at the pattern of rhyming words like yesterday and others we just read. M was impressed with himself for reading the whole of Sea Fever out loud.
Then we went through Stopping By Woods looking for various poetic devices suggested in the FIAR manual (like repetition, metaphor etc) and finding examples. We’ll look for others in more poems next week too.
Monday
Today we did activities about snow. We read about snowflakes and cut some out online. Then M made a hexagonal prism, the basic shape of a snowflake. He made some paper snowflakes and L covered them in glitter (and the rest of the dining room LOL). We also read a short biography of Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley who was the first person to take photos of snowflakes back in the 1800s.
Tuesday
We talked some more about poetry and what makes something a poem. We read more poems together and M had a go at writing his own after initially being sure it was impossible. We found some more examples of various poetic devices to make a booklet about them. M finished writing out Stopping By Woods.
Wednesday
Today we read about Robert Frost’s life and M narrated back the bits he was most interested in - such as Robert Frost dropping out of first and then second grade after a few weeks and being home educated! We also listened to Robert Frost reading Stopping By Woods.
Thursday
This was a finishing off day and I helped M with putting all his things together in a lapbook type arrangement.
