Most of this week was spent out of the garden (because we're just waiting for the corn and sunflowers to germinate at this point), much to Zoo Boy's disappointment (he's decided he just LOVES gardening), so we spent it exploring some gardening poems and doing some copy work with them, as well as writing our own garden-related poetry.
Above is "The Sunflower" by James Montgomery, below is an excerpt from a Navajo corn-planting ritual. (This is J's work, Zoo Boy wrote shorter portions of these poems.)
At the end of the week, we started writing our own poetry about gardening. Both boys are familiar with Acrostic poetry, and we worked on one poem together as an example (we did it on a dry-erase board and I didn't think to take a photo to save it, d'oh!). The boys then selected their own garden-related word and wrote their own Acrostics: 
Above, J's poem "Garden". He's played around with Acrostics before, so he dove whole-hearted into the exercise. Zoo Boy mumbled repeatedly about how hard it was, and ran each line by me asking if it was OK or not (my answer was always "anything you want to say is OK, this is your poem"). I need to be careful with him and assignments like this, he's so easily convinced that he "can't" or that what he does is not "good enough". In the end, he was very excited about what he came up with and proud of himself, saying that even though it was really hard, he thought it was also really fun to write his own poem. Here is his poem, "Corn" :
We will be continuing to work with poetry throughout the rest of our planting unit (and will probably wrap our housing/building unit in with it as well since it's going to overlap).I had planned a painting for our last day of the week, but we wound up taking an impromptu day off because of hatching ducklings:
If that's not a good reason to skip school, I don't know what is!
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