Guesting on Poetry Studio

Hi everyone,

On the evening of Tuesday, December 1, I’ll be a guest speaker on Georgia Heard’s series of online poetry writing workshops called The Poet’s Studio. I’ll be on 7:45-ish EST, 6:45 CST p.m.. I’ve agreed to speak about rhyme and meter, a favorite topic of mine, although this far it out it’s possible that my subject might be widened to include other aspects of poetry.
I copied this just now from Georgia’s description of three of the workshops.

“Tuesdays December 1st – December 15th

7:00-9:30 PM (EST)

Whether you’re beginning your poetry journey, or have written poetry for years, in this 3 session workshop we will play, explore and write in a wide range of poetic forms from traditional forms like the sonnet to contemporary forms like poems-for-two-voices. We’ll explore how to artfully merge form and content. Each week you will receive feedback on what you write from Georgia Heard and your peers.

Irene Latham, author of Nine: A Book of Nonet Poems and This Poem Is A Nest and David Harrison, poet laureate of Drury University, and author of 92 books including his newest After Dark: Poems about Nocturnal Animals will be our special guests in two of the workshops.”

For anyone interested, here’s more information about the workshops and how to sign up. I’m telling you about this now because sessions tend to fill early. https://www.georgiaheard.com/the-poets-studio/

Interviews and auctions

Hi everyone,

The webinar last week with Laura Backes of Kitlit Distancing Social is now available in their archives. If you know someone who might like to watch it, please pass this link along. To those who saw the original or replay and decided to follow my blog, I thank you again and hope you will enjoy what you find here.

Kidlit Distancing Social #21 Replay – An Evening with Legendary Children’s Poet David Harrison

Also, today is the silent auction where I’m up for bids. https://www.charityauctionstoday.com/auctions/Virtual-Celebrate-SPS-13647/items/meettheauthordavidharrison4personalizedcopiesofhischildrensbooks-245342?category_id=0

Webinar finished

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your encouragement yesterday. Once that Mary Jo Fresch and I got warmed up, with Kim Bernard’s able guidance we flew straight through the webinar. I think the final time was eighteen minutes so we were about where we wanted to be. I believe that the finished result will be posted today on the Shell Education site.

LEARNING THROUGH POETRY is the series of books that we wrote for PreK-2 students to help them develop the connection between the sounds they hear and the words they see. Phonemic awareness is an important indicator of a child’s readiness to read.

For each of the 96 poems in the series I began with a basic sound (phoneme), such as a short vowel, a blended sound, long vowel, digraph, or consonant. I made a list of words that contained the same sound that I wanted to write about. Then I worked them around in various ways until the thread of an idea became apparent.

The final poem, in each case, features as many of the subject sounds as I could work in while also writing a legitimate poem in the process. It was a challenge but one that I rather enjoyed.

Here’s an example. The sound was the blend GR.

Grandmas
David L. Harrison

Gruff old grandpa grizzlies growl
Grimly when they eat.
With grabby claws
They fill their paws
With veggies, fruit, and meat.

Grandma grizzlies’ “grrrs” are sweet,
Their love to spoil their cubs
With grasshopper grits,
Cherry pits,
And gruel with greasy grubs.

We think gruel with grubs is gross
But grand-cub grizzlies slurp it,
They grin and groan,
Grunt and moan,
And roll their eyes and burp it.

Mary Jo used her special skills and talents to create classroom activities that teachers can follow to reinforce the subject sound in fun, useful ways. She managed to find all sorts of connections to common core standards and core subjects. What originally began as an idea for one book grew over time into the series of five titles.

Our publisher flew us to California where we spent a laughter-filled day recording all the poems so that each of the books contains a CD of our voices reading the poems in that volume.

If you know someone who should know about this series, I hope you’ll pass along the information, you can open http://shelleducation.com and search for LEARNING THROUGH POETRY.

New webinar

Hi, everyone,

A new experience for me. Three hours from the time of this posting I’ll join Mary Jo Fresch in recording a 20-minute webinar about our new 5-book series — LEARNING THROUGH POETRY.The leader of the program is Kim Bernard with Shell Education. Kim will speak from California. Mary Jo from Ohio, and I’ll pitch in from Florida.

Yesterday we had a practice session that went well so today is the real deal. We’ve been reminded to turn everything off that might make a noise and even to watch the sound of paper being shuffled.

After the webinar has been shown at sales meetings I believe it will be available to other viewers, perhaps through the Shell/TCM websites. Fingers crossed.

David