After Class

After taking the prairie ecology class for four weeks, I’m now staying at Lakeside Laboratory for an extra week to do some writing. I’ll continue posting about the prairie, but my general writing is gravitating toward other things as well.

This week, the time is mine to use as I wish, mostly for reading and writing. I am, however, also helping out with a kid’s day camp, teaching creative “journaling” for an hour each day. The camp is bug themed and the kids spend a lot of time each day with nets and bug jars. They’re a bright little group and they seem to enjoy the chance to write and draw for a little while after lunch.

Yesterday we worked on found poems, poems that are made from existing texts. I gave the children bug profiles from the National Geographic website and asked them to select their favorite words and phrases to combine in a new, poetic way. They would be able to add, change, and remove words as necessary. We talked a little about alliteration, line breaks, punctuation, and repetition. Some picked up on the idea a lot more quickly than others, but they all had a few good lines by the end of ten minutes of writing. My own found poem was about camel spiders:

Wind Scorpion

Rumors of bloodthirsty nature
circulating half size
but spread with voracious appetite.

Untrue.

What can eat camels’ stomachs and sleeping soldiers?

Not spiders, only solpugids. Another new arachnid
with misleading perspective.

Untrue.

Hardy desert dwellers
visit death
only upon small birds.