It's Pi Day! Celebrate 3.14159.........

Hotel Room Circles

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Students - Today is Pi Day!  On March 14, today, people the world over celebrate the amazing number that is Pi.  Last year on this day, thanks to the enthusiasm of her wonderful math teacher, our daughter Georgia memorized Pi out to one hundred places.  That was amazing, and so now I will celebrate Pi Day in my head and heart every year.

You can learn more about Pi here at Pi Day or here at Wonderopolis.  You can learn more about calculating Pi here at wikiHow.  Happy Pi Day!  Go eat pie.

This week I have had the pleasure of visiting Jone MacCulloch's blog, Check it Out.  On Wednesday, we had a chat about FOREST HAS A SONG, and today Jone is graciously sharing my poem, "Sound Waves", from the new POETRY FRIDAY ANTHOLOGY FOR SCIENCE: THIRD GRADE STUDENT EDITION, compiled by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong.

Jamie Palmer is sharing a fantabulous list of notebook resources over at my other blog, Sharing Our Notebooks, this week.  Stop by to learn about some new books and to enter the giveaway! 

Much gratitude to Kristie Miner and the Binghamton Area Reading Council for such a lovely evening last night at Traditions at the Glen. It was simply a pleasure to share poetry with and write with such warm and wonderful teachers.

Book Display

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Kristie and Amy

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Beautiful Tables

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Happy Poetry Pi-Day!

Please share a comment below if you wish.

E is for EXPONENT

EXPONENT

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Students - To be honest, I was not happy when I pointed at the word EXPONENT.  It didn't seem like a beautiful word, and it doesn't have many great rhymes (proponent, component).  I don't have any strong or funny feelings for exponents, and I worried that this would be a toughie.

But then I decided to hug my word, embrace this little surprise of the Dictionary Hike (see upper left-hand sidebar for a definition of this project), and I am so glad I did.  What you see here is a short definition poem written in the voice of an exponent.  A poem written in the voice of the speaker is called a mask poem, and I decided to make my little exponent speaker tell about his/her job, to feel proud even though exponents are small.  In the end, I enjoyed experimenting with writing a simple definition, hoping of course that math teachers will find this verse useful.

Would you like to visit some exponents and learn about the exponent rules? You can do so over at Algebra LAB.

So, if you're taking a Dictionary Hike, and if you point to a word that's not your favorite, consider giving it a whirl anyway.  You, like me, may be surprised by what is in your pen!

This week, if you visit Sharing Our Notebooks, you can hear Janet talk all about how she (doesn't) keep notebooks, the way she revisits old ideas, and you (like me) will learn some great revision strategies for your own poems.  If you leave a comment on that post by the end of today, you may win these four books, generously donated by Janet!  I will announce the winner tomorrow, Poetry Friday.

You can win these books over at Sharing Our Notebooks!

Each day of this dictionary project, Lisa V. will write and post a haiku for that day's word at her blog.  You can read all of these over at Lisa's Poem of the Week.  Please join us and share in the comments if you wish!

The Poem Farm is becoming searchable by topic and poetic technique.  There are now around 70 poems listed and linked both ways so as to make this space useful for young writers and teachers. If you have a suggestion for me, please share as I welcome ideas!

Please share a comment below if you wish!

You can like The Poem Farm on Facebook for more poemlove...

My Birthday - Poems about Occasions

Calendar

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Happy birthday to all leap year babies!

Students - Today's poem is a holiday poem, a math poem, and a riddle poem! The other day, when I sat down to write, I got thinking about what a special year this is...leap year! I stopped to think about those with birthdays on February 29 and how they can only celebrate their true birth date every four years.

Writing a math riddle poem is a neat little exercise.  Just come up with a math problem in your head (or on paper) and then play around with it and with words, turning it into a verse.

Having a leap year birthday puts a person in a special sort of club, much like being a lefty. And so of course, there is a group you can belong to. It's called The Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies. You can read about why founder Peter Brouwer founded this group here at the LOS ANGELES TIMES.

Did you know that there is a special newspaper that only comes out on leap days?  It's in France, and it's called La Bougie du Sapeur!

To read about some children who have leap year birthdays, check out THE WASHINGTON POST.  To read a bout a leap year couple, check out npr.  Too, npr has some suggestions about how to spend this extra 24 hours...

And now for a few words from Marilla, NY native, Scott Gowanlock, about having a leap year birthday.

I love having a leap year birthday because I can trick people when they ask my actual birthday. They don't actually believe I am actually five years old, so when I show them my license, they are amazed. Also, 75% of the time I can have a 2-day birthday because I was born in February so we celebrate it on the 28th, but I was also born the day after the 28th which is March 1. This gives me a 2-day birthday! We usually celebrate it on whichever weekend falls closest to the day, either before or after.

When I was born, I was supposed to be on the news as I was the first Buffalo leap year baby born in 1992. However, on that same day, a woman had her second leap year baby so they interviewed her instead.

Thank you, Scott.   Happy birthday!

Did you figure out the answer to this poem's question?

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Nonfiction Week & ∞ - Poem #250!

This is poem #6 in this week's nonfiction challenge to post a new nonfiction poem each day.  Today's poem came after perusing GO FIGURE, a book chock-full of fun-to-read information about numbers and math.

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If you'd like to read a super book of math poems/math problems, check this out.  It's a blast!  Poet Betsy Franco has a way of sneaking into the corners of your brain for good.

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Students - did you ever write a math poem?  Once again, I realize how poems live everywhere.  Open up that math book.  What poems lurk within?

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MyPoWriYe #55 - Bonfire (two versions)

Yesterday, I again had the opportunity to work with fifth and sixth graders at Caledonia-Mumford Central Schools.  Together with teachers Katrina Hatch, Courtney Monahan, Kyle Leonard, and Deborah Bussewitz, we are studying and writing poetry about the local area as a part of a larger project, Buy Local Build a Future where each project hosts its own blog.  Soon, poems by these students will be bound into books and read along with music from Kyle's student ukulele players.  

As part of our book-making project, students will colorize photographs of the area and are also welcome to draw or paint scenes from their hometown to go along with the poems.  We will share copies of these anthologies with the school libraries, public library, local museums, and maybe even a town diner.  Spending this morning in the Big Springs Museum, I found part of myself wishing to be from Caledonia-Mumford too!

Somehow today, these students and I began talking about building bonfires.  At our home, Henry is in charge of this cookout-chore, and when I said so, one fifth grade boy said, "Sometimes I get to light the match."  I could not stop thinking about his words today, for with great responsibility comes new learning.  I believe that such rites of passage may be more valuable than we know.

Here is a second version of the same poem.  The first is the original, but this morning I got to playing with line breaks to see how it might work as a concrete poem.  I'd be interested in hearing which one you like better.  Sometimes concrete poems feel forced to me, and I'm not sure yet which of these I prefer.

This week, Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect offers us the challenge of math poems.  My poem is in the comments...about four leaf clovers.  Feel free to post your own math poem over on this week's "Monday Poetry Stretch".

Thank you, Garrison Keillor at The Writer's Almanac, for informing us that today is the birthday of poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Roethke.  Let their spirits guide us all...

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