Valentines and Poetry

Megan's flowers to give to the girls.

 This past Thursday was our monthly homeschool get-together (We have around 15 families that get together now) and the theme for the month was poetry with a valentine exchange thrown in for good measure.

  This year since we have more kids we decided that we would divide the kids up into groups for the exchange so that the number wasn't overwhelming. We ended up having the girls in one group and the boys in the other.

  We always do homemade for this sort of thing (for a few reasons - 1. It allows us to do something creative 2. We can use something we have on hand rather than buying anything - being frugal  and 3. We can possibly give something that is more exciting than we would if we would buy something economically.)

 For Megan this year since all of her recipients would be girls we decided it would be fun to make flower bracelets and pins. For the bracelets we had saved the inside from a bunch of floral tape that I had used (in my flower business) and when we cut the circle and then wrap it with something soft it makes a very good bracelet. We wrapped them with odd bits of ribbon and fabric that we had in our stash. Then we made flowers out of fabric scraps and beads and glued them on. We didn't have enough bracelets for everybody so we made some into pins for the older girls.

 Above Megan is displaying several of the bracelets. They were fun to make and the little girls that got them seemed to enjoy them too.

 Mara and Aaron decided to make cookies for their valentines.

 Then we took some of the plastic that comes around the flowers that I get, carefully washed it, cut it into rectangles and then sewed it into little bags. I thought they turned out rather cute. On the top of the bag we folded over some card stock with "Happy Valentines Day!" and "From" stamped on it and then stapled it in place.

  Jonathan wasn't quite sure what to do for his valentines as he didn't want anything associated with hearts or things of that nature. He decided that maybe he should carve something but when you are making 24 of them - what would he do?

  He decided on little cars and trucks. He did have a plan for drilling holes and attaching wheels that would really work with axles in them but ran out of time so I suggested gluing on  buttons. They don't quite work as well (though they do slide pretty nicely) but they do look cute anyway.

  We printed out some cards that say "Racing Your way to say: Happy Valentines Day" and then he drew roads on them and taped on the cars (Actually he didn't use tape - we are busy using up old political stickers for projects like this!).


   Another part of our day was the kids reading or reciting poems. That ended up being pretty fun. There was such a fun variety of poetry shared and such different ways of sharing it. Mara did "The Touch of the Master's Hand", Jonathan did "The Turkey Shot out of the Oven" and Aaron did "The Optimist"  which goes like this:

"The optimist fell ten stories,

and at each window bar,

He shouted to the folks inside:

"Doing all right so far!"

 

Author unknown

 

We thought that one was rather clever. Megan ended up not doing one as she wasn't feeling very good that day. The other kids brought a neat selection too - some of them had even written their own.

 

 

 After reading/reciting poetry we had all the kids write poetry. One of the ladies in our group had come up with a lot of really neat ideas for pretty simple poetry and so we had different tables that the kids could go to where the adults would help them in writing a poem. It ended up being pretty fun. I plan on sharing all those ideas some day soon along with some others ways that we have incorporated poetry into our lives (That doesn't come naturally to me as poetry isn't really my thing). Anyway - that post will be long and so I will save it for another day.

Magnetic poetry was one of the options for the kids so Aaron (with a little help from me and with struggles on the part of us both by not being able to find all the words that we wanted) "wrote" the one above.

 I would love to hear your ideas for fun homemade valentines (maybe we can use them next year) or thoughts on poetry!