Feelings & Nature - Connecting to Emotions through Poetry

In this quiet activity, children connect to their feelings by assigning human emotions to the different things they see around them. Children learn to describe emotions in this brief, poetic exercise.

Preparation: You will need a stack of 3” x 5” index cards. On the cards, draw simple faces exhibiting different emotions. Go online and look for emoticons if you want some ideas. Draw the face and write the emotion underneath. You’ll want to start with a deck of at least twenty emotion cards. If you are doing this activity with a large group, plan on at least two cards for each child. During the play of the game, different children can use the same card.

Hand each child one of the cards. If the child can’t read the word, ask them what emotion they think the face is showing. Explain that their goal is to look around and find something that represents the emotion on their card. If children are confused, ask them to imagine life as a rock. Would the rock feel happy, sad, or bored?

If you have a group, you can warm up to this activity by asking them to imagine if different objects had emotions what feelings they would have? In poetry, the pathetic fallacy is the practice of attaching human emotions to nature, animals, and inanimate objects. You may decide to give this brief literary lesson to preteens or teens. With younger children, this activity can lead to a discussion of how things that aren’t alive don’t have feelings.

With a small group, when a child finds an object that represents the emotion on his card, the child can call the group to stop, point out the object and then allow the others 10-to-20 seconds to guess the emotion.

Option: With a large group, you could create a list poem, in which children connect the emotion to an object they saw on the walk. This poem also uses similes, or comparisons.

For example,
As stubborn as a rock
As bored as a fence
As flexible as a twig
As calm as a leaf

Nature Lists

Okay, maybe the only writing you do on a regular basis is emails; the idea of writing for fun – for the sake of writing – may have never crossed your mind. Your child may or may not feel excited by the prospects of writing; most of what he does is connected to schoolwork.

So, why write in nature? Nature provides a wonderful source of inspiration. Instead of dredging through memories, you can write about what you see at that very moment. Before you turn away from this blog, the writing activity I’m suggesting is super easy, as in if you can write a list for the supermarket you can write this list poem.

A list poem is just what it sounds like – a list. You don’t need to worry about rhyme, parts of speech, punctuation, grammar, or anything else that often causes people to stare at a white sheet of paper as if they are gazing at their doom. This is a fun (really) poem for one or for a group.

Select a topic, something that you are looking at, whether that is the beach, a forest, a park, a tree, a garden, a flower, or whatever else captures you eye. Write the name at the top of the page, “Horseneck Beach,” “Piping Plover,” “Red Maple Swamp,” “Tree,” “Thunderstorm.”
Now, write a list. The list could be nouns – tangible things associated with your topic. You might list verbs – actions engaged in by the topic.

You may even combine the two into short phrases, object with its action (“branches sway”). Each word or brief phrase gets its own line in this poem. The words don’t have to be in any particular order, although as you make your list, you could decide to rearrange the order of some of the words.

This is it. You’ll want at least five lines to your poem. Although this sounds simplistic, the effect of reading the list aloud can be powerful and impressive. The single words or brief phrases captures not just the essence of your topic but shows your emotional connection to your subject through your word choice.

For young children, this can be a bit like a game; for older children, adolescents, and adults, this is a simple way to express their observations. A group can call out words to one person who records them and they will create a document that binds together their experiences.

You and your children can incorporate these poems into artwork, photo albums, scrapbooks. List poems can become a spontaneous activity at any time, in any place.

Write a Diamante about Nature

Originally published 3/01/2011 at explorealongtheway.com
While making observations in nature you may want a record of what you see. You could take a picture or make some notes, but another way of collecting your interpretation of your time in nature is to write a poem.

If you never willingly wrote a poem because you think a poem has to be obscure, this simple format allows you to capture tangible details. In essence, a diamante is a diamond-shape poem. The lines don’t have to rhyme. As an added bonus for adults and the children, you don’t even have to think in partial or entire lines of poetry. A diamante is constructed of individual words that are placed in a specific pattern.

A poem is a great way to capture observations that you and children have made in nature. A diamante feels a bit more purposeful than taking notes; because, what are you going to do with those notes? When you write a poem, you are done. Accent a diamante with a photograph or a drawing and you can set the two in a scrapbook or combine them on the computer and post them online for friends and family to share.

The basic format of a diamante uses specific types of words. Writers can work on this poem on their own or you can lead this as a group activity, with individuals calling out words that fit the structure. The key to holding this structure together is that the selected words should have something to do with the topic, as described by the first word.

Line 1: Noun (person, place or thing)

Line 2: Adjective Adjective (words that describes a person place or thing; not an action)

Line 3: Participle Participle Participle (a verb, an action, ending in –ing)

Line 4: Noun Noun Noun Noun

Line 5: Participle Participle Participle

Line 6: Adjective Adjective

Line 7: Noun (another way of describing the person, place, or thing from the first line)

You use the words that best capture the sights, senses and experiences of a specific location. That’s it. Sixteen words, no punctuation. You are a poet. Why not start by writing a diamante and posting it below in the comments?