Celebrating Poetry Month with a PoeTea Party

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April is Poetry Month and we decided it would be fun to celebrate with a Poe-Tea.  Poetry Tea Time is an activity promoted by an online language arts curriculum called Brave Writer.  They even have an entire website dedicated to it -- Poetry Tea Time.  We were having some struggles with the monotony of life in lock-down and this seemed to be the perfect solution.

To start, I pulled out any poetry books I could find in the house.  We didn't have a huge variety but the kids didn't seem to mind.  I had each person put a sticky tab on 2 poems that they wanted to have read during tea.  The Shell Silverstein books were a hit when picking poems since the funny illustrations were so appealing.

At lunch time we set everything up.  We even used a table cloth! We had herbal tea with milk and sugar, ants on a log, cream cheese and jelly sandwiches(cut in triangles of course), fruit, cheese and brownies for desert.  I asked Alexa to play some harp music and called everyone over.  To say everyone was excited would be an understatement.  They were thrilled.  We enjoyed our tea and treats while reading through the poems.  I think this will be a more frequent occurrence in our house as the kids loved it and immediately asked if we could do it the next day.

In my search I uncovered so many wonderful free poetry resources. Below are some of my favorites.

Poets.org has wonderful resources including ideas for 30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month in the Virtual Classroom and Poems for Kids.

ShelSilverstein.com has a learning resources page with tons of activities.

Poetry foundation has poems to explore that you can sort and find kids poems.

Audible has released free books for all during the lock-down and one of the choices is Great Children's Poems

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