Power to the Pizza Poetry Party

After encouraging promotion for this program as an intention for celebrating National Poetry Month, I was concerned we only had five kids registered for the program and I wasn't sure how the turn-out would be and was surprised that the pizza element didn't make registration more tempting. Despite the registration count, this still turned out to be a terrific program with those registered and those who participated in our poetry contest attending.

I started off the program by playing the dvd Out of Wonder:Poems Celebrating Poets by Kwame Alexander. This was the perfect dvd to play in the background while they were eating their pizza and having their lemonade because it is a collection of beautiful poems by famous authors celebrating other famous authors by incorporating their different poetry styles. The music and animated illustrations were a nice touch too.

Once the kids ate their pizza and mingled a bit, they were comfortable enough to read their poems out loud. They could choose from the variety of poetry books I had on display to read from (including Shel Silverstein), a poem they wrote, or from printouts of poems I had available from the library's collection of books.

A poetry contest winner read her poem that won the poetry contest to the group and everyone else read poems from library books or from the printouts from library books. The group of girls were very comfortable and welcoming towards each other and I seen great teamwork with reading their poems together if one was shy.

I seen a lot of learning going on, whether it was reading practice, presenting to a group, teamwork, encouragement, or realizing the different types of poems and the emotions they presented. They read serious poems, silly poems, and even sang their poems to the group, showing that they knew the connection between song lyrics being poetry as well.

Overall, this was a nice group size for this type of environment and made them feel comfortable enough to read poems to each other.