Golden Shovels with Green Gables

We've been reading Anne of Green Gables and started a "golden shovel" poem together (ages ago). I had the kids finish up their poems drafts on Tuesday while I was on campus and it was lovely to see these come through in my email.

Basically, we took a line from AoGG, "The birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine," put those words down the righthand side of our page and then wrote into those words. It can be harder than it sounds to pull off!

Here's Benjamin's:

 I was meandering through the
countless birches
that made up the greenwood in
Tongass NationalForest. The
fir and maple hollow
that I found myself turned in turned
into a burning  torch as
the golden
flames reached the temperature as
burning sunshine.

Here's Zoë's:

  I wander through the

             tangle of oak and birches

                  searching for a meadow in

                  the woods. I follow the

                  sound of a brook and find a hollow

                  tree with mushrooms, turned

                  on it’s side, looking as

                  a dog does, lying in the meadow with golden

flowers looking as

 the warm sunshine.

And here's Alexander's:

I wandered through the

jumble of oak aspen & birches

searching for a clearing in

the woodland. I follow the

sound of a babbling brook to find a hollow

that turned

very as

the only golden

sunshine.

We started it together on the board but never got around to finishing, which is why I assigned it...because I would really like to wipe the board! That's also why the first line of theirs all sounds very similar (they were allowed to use what we'd already written together). 

I didn't finish my version, but I did submit a handful of poems to a journal and they accepted 3...or 4...of them (I'm not actually clear on how many, but at least 3), so that's exciting news. I'm not sure when they'll be coming out yet.

And Benjamin finished and submitted his spooky story to the Georgia Writer's Museum "Spooky Story Contest." Zoë should be finishing up her story next week.