Smrt Lernins

Today, for his World of Poetry assignment, Captain Science wrote this currently untitled sonnet:

The ground is falling, building crashing down
And houses fly like they have never flown.
A fire rages all throughout the town.
The city burned and everything we own.
The tower crashes, breaking the old clock
And waves of force are bringing down the house.
A sack of flour bursts upon a rock
And sleeping people afterwards are roused.
The blast so loud you hear it far away
And junk starts to pollute the city pond.
Debris is falling, blazes rage today
And force is snapping mighty metal bonds,
But finally the trembling terror ends
So everyone can fix the breaks and bends.

An refresher exercise in iambic and trochaic meters:

Seasons

A winter morning is a pretty sight
A snowman winking in the freezing cold
A newborn year is starting in the spring,
a garden growing full of healthy fruits
A summer noonday simmering bright and hot
A freezing pool is crowded cold and blue
The autumn time has leaves all red and bright
The benefit of seasons is the fun

[Unnamed Poem]

Evil rising on the horizon
Arrows whizzing through the air
Swords are clashing; heads are bashing
over something very rare.
This is chaos, causing slaughter
Death is spreading like a tear
He is lying. She went flying.
Whoa! Here it comes: A BEAR!

The last one’s ending caught me by surprise and made me laugh like crazy. “That’s the PUNCHLINE!” he said.

Captain Science just finished chapter 2 in World of Poetry. This is his end-of-chapter writing assignment:

Volcanic Storm

Mountain silently smoking,
Ground is starting to rumble.
Rats and pets act strangely,
Rocks are starting to tumble.
Blasting bombs of stone are falling,
Flashing lava freely flowing.
Dust is shrouding, ash is clouding.
Whoosh! The volcanoe’s slowing.

A Tiger’s Life
by Captain Science

Hunting Prey
Tiger lying on the ground,
He makes no mistakes…
Watching an unwary prey.
Very soon he’ll pounce.
Lying low, unnoticed there,
He will time it right.
Pounce! He strikes his sorry prey.
Very soon he’ll eat.

The Journey Back Home
As he crawls back to his den,
With his hunted prey,
He tiptoes, tiptoes on his paws, and
Thinks of the long day.
Daily work is done and gone
Memories fade away,
When he gets back to his home,
He will eat his prey.

The Long Night
As the bright moon rises high,
Storms are coming in.
Howling wind and stinging rain,
Battering the den.
Yet the tiger stays untouched,
Dry and not afraid.
Staying strong and trying hard,
a barricade he made.

I think the whole thing is great, but I love his meter in the final stanza! That’s my boy.

Take a moment to watch this brilliant animation “Typography” by Ronnie Bruce of a poem by Taylor Mali.

Are you guilty of the “relentless interrogative?” Are your children?

I know that I am going to make a more concerted effort to have my declarative sentences actually declare and to speak with certainty and confidence in my opinions. I don’t want to be a part of a downward slide into inarticulation. Speak with authority so that your children can learn to speak with authority. Let’s model conviction for the next generation.

Captain Science’s assignment from Michael Clay Thompson’s Building Poems today was to write a poem based on a photograph. He chose Steve McCurry’s famous photograph of the Afghan refugee girl, published in National Geographic.

The Afghan Girl Her eyes are like a rainbow, yet her clothes are very tattered, then her hair has several messy spots. Is she no more than ten? Her countenance is frightening, her visage looks concerned. Her memories are troubled times. There’s nothing she has earned.

Ten days, y’all. Ten more freaking days! I’m so excited, I could practically piddle on the rug.

This week, Captain Science went back and redid a few lessons from Paragraph Town using his other reading as the subject matter. He finished (finally, Mr. Dawdler!) reading Wind in the Door and Nordic Gods and Heroes. He completed several sentences in Practice Town.

Officer Daddyman and Captain Science worked together on some algebra word problems of Daddyman’s devising. Captain Science is greatly looking forward to starting Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra, now that he has a little taste of that kind of math. Algebra was always my favorite mathematical subject, so I’m excited about it, too!

Captain Science has advanced to the next set of piano books and continues to show a natural talent for it. He’s working with 8th notes and runs, and is also doing a little jazz, which is fun to hear! Two hours a week is a lot of piano lesson, but I think the time investment is going to pay off in the long run.

Our co-op is about done. Brain class is over (and none too soon, as tempers have been flaring and the last class involved Eclectic Girl calling Captain Science a hoarder, and Captain Science calling Eclectic Girl a stealer, neither of which is true), game class will continue with no foreseeable end, and the short story class will only have one more meeting together. Along with writing, the students have learned about editing, submitting drafts to magazines and journals, and writing contests. I wish Captain Science had been willing to invest more time in working on his story, as I’m having a hard time getting a good full-length draft from him, but he’s not the only one in the class balking at it a bit. I think we’ll take a step back and let him work on it more over the summer.

Physics lab was pretty much the same-ol’, same-ol’. At least Captain Science and Eclectic Girl didn’t squabble, right?

Captain Science did a ton of poetry work this week, since we didn’t get much done in Building Poems last week. He covered limericks, creating his own stanzas, metaphor, simile, apostrophe, and personification this week, writing poems for each topic. The following are his personification and apostrophe poems, which he decided to combine together in this format:

Sun and Moon

I.
The sunlight shines upon the sea
his goal is to light everything.
While lighting up the other side
the moon illuminates the tides.
For many years they battled far,
but now they always share the earth.

II.
O, brightest sun, you hottest light
begins the day and stops the night.
Yet O great moon, your noble rays
shall make much beauty and end the day.
For many aeons you two have fought
but at this time you battle not.

I’m sure you can imagine how proud I am of him!

Patchfire writes about homeschoolers needing to hear a little bragging, too. I think that the best way to get that for Captain Science is by sharing his poety, which strikes me as quite mature for his age. I’m no poetry-naive yokel, either; My master’s thesis was a collection of poetry. I hope you’ll humor me in taking these opportunities to share the Captain’s works.

Here is Captain Science’s latest poem from Michael Clay Thompson’s Building Poems, a poem in the Rime Royal form (7 lines of iambic pentameter in an ababbcc rhyme scheme):

The Great Greek Heroes

The great Greek beasts and heroes long ago
Had much adventures many, many times
Like Jason and the Argonauts had rowed
The monsters fell to them; They were sublime,
And later on in one great different time,
Achilles was the greatest hero yet.
He fought great Hector and he won, you bet!

We’re going to work on not overusing “many” and “great,” but the kid managed to stick “Argonauts” and and “adventures” into iambic pentameter. Not only that, he correctly used some of his Caesar’s English vocabulary. Yes, he pretty much rocks.

Four poetic meters, that is: iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter, dactylic tetrameter, and anapestic pentameter.

Captain Science’s assignment for Michael Clay Thompson’s Building Poems today was to choose a topic, choose four words, and write four four-line poems using the above four meters, each containing those four words and addressing the topic. Because it’s a rather challenging task, I agreed to do it as well. We had about an hour to work on our poems.

Captain Science’s topic: Roman wars
Captain Science’s words: The (I told him that’s a cheater word and next time it won’t count), Roman, loud, and war

Iambic Pentameter
The Roman drums of war sounded out loud
You could hear many men crying out loud
And then there was something that made them scream
A laser was attacking with a beam

Trochaic Tetrameter
Roman solders war my men and
Arrows shriek loud through the air, then
catapults chuck boulders ’round — whoa
One arrow ’bout grazed my hair!

Dactylic Trimeter (he forgot he was doing tetrameter)
Bash! Oh no — bloom! There goes my tower
’cause of the catapult’s boulder, it
flew so loud, yet it did,
I had some horrible curses, so
I cursed the Romans then the war
stopped strangely, ’cause of the dead army.

(This was supposed to be anapestic tetrameter, but he totally lost the meter on this one — I like it, though)
I’m a sorceror, so I cursed
all the Romans. The two armies
had warred day and night for
10 YEARS! Finally we have
won, and against Rome’s
army, now we are going
home so we can celebrate so loud.

My topic: Seasons
My words: apple, flowers, faces, feel

Iambic Pentameter
The sun beats down, the flowers brown and wilt
Our faces, also brown, are turning pink
My mother’s apple pie served a la mode
I feel a warmth that isn’t from the heat

Trochaic Tetrameter
Apple picking in the orchard
Falling leaves brush by our faces
Flowers of the summer fading
Autumn colors in their places

Dactylic Tetrameter
Oh, can you feel it? The winter is fading and
flowers are peeking their faces up out of the
snow and the apple trees soon will be blooming, so
fare the well, winter, for springtime is entering

Anapestic Pentameter
Faces cold, feel the snow soft and fine on the pines, evening time.
Frozen cheeks, apple red, snowflakes light on your head. Softly said
Whispered word, barely heard in the night’s dimming light.
Close your eyes, safe and warm. Winter storm singing nigh, lullaby.

Captain Science wrote this little ditty today as an exercise in iambs and spondees.

I go into the kitchen
To get some pretzel sticks
And how much pretzels do I get
Well, nine’s how much I pick.

He didn’t quite integrate his understanding of the spondee into his poetic meter, but he’s getting there. He can explain it just fine, but since he’s only nine and still occasionally emphasizes words oddly in conversation, I don’t expect his usage to be perfect yet. We discussed that “many,” not “much,” would be grammatically correct here. He rewrote it to conserve the iambic rhythm and to try to use the spondee correctly. “Many” in the last line is intended to be the spondee, and when he reads the poem aloud, he stresses both syllables of “many.”

I go into the kitchen
To get some pretzel sticks
How many pretzels do I get?
Well, nine’s how many I pick.