Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Of Stories and Supermoons...

One of the other lovely moments of this past weekend was when our little three-person family hunkered down in the windows of the sweet girl's room after dark on Saturday night so we could watch the supermoon rising over the nearby hills. It was an awesome sight -- big, bright, tinging the very dark clouds in front of it silver, highlighting the outlines of trees.

The sweet girl was hugely excited. A supermoon, after all, is a somewhat novel occurrence (it's what you call a full moon that coincides with the closest approach the moon makes to earth in its elliptical orbit) and we hadn't caught the last one, fourteen months before. She came up with a story idea about Luna, the moon who once in a while becomes a superhero, and we've been working on it together during language arts time -- a treat for us both, since we officially finished the year's grammar text last week.

Which reminds me...any teacher/writer folks out there, do you have any story writing websites or curricula you especially love or recommend? Especially for late elementary/middle grade years? So far I have trusted to our love of reading good stories and just the actual act of writing stories -- S. writes them often, and sometimes we write them together -- to incorporate lots of natural learning. But as she rounds the corner on her tenth birthday and we contemplate (gulp!) fifth grade in the fall, I've found myself wanting to look into some resources.

But back to the supermoon. I wrote this little poem, full of sibilant sounds, in honor of the event:


The supermoon
ascends silently,
slides past cloudbank,
seams a silver lining,
then stands sentinel over
sighing sycamores…
and shines.

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