Christmas WS's!
Our daughter’s school is about to hosts its annual “Speech Arts” event. I’m sure there are lots of these school contests at this time of year and there are most likely variations on the theme here. Our kids get to choose whether to recite a poem, do a Bible reading and/or tell a well-known story in their own words.
I have to admit, although I like the idea of kids learning poems by heart and having to present them in front of judges, this contest is a headache for our family. I have found it hard to find poems that are fun and engaging for a young elementary school child, like mine. I guess I had been looking in the wrong places.
That’s until we came across the works of Bruce Lansky. By pure chance, we received No More Homework! No More Tests! as a Christmas gift. It’s a collection of poems by many authors, and Bruce Lansky’s poems had us in fits of giggles. There’s the one about the monster that comes into the classroom and starts eating the items off the teacher’s desk or the one about the Principal announcing there’s a new cook at school and that there will be a special menu of deep-fried monkey meat, jellyfish soufflé and chocolate-covered ants, among other delicious dishes.
You can probably guess our little Speech Arts contestant has picked the new cook at school poem to recite this Wednesday. Wish her luck.
If you’d like to learn more about Bruce Lansky his bio and poetry can be found on the Poetry Foundation web site. It’s packed full of fun poems, silly rhymes and silly songs. And to my delight I found it also features many more authors.
