Summer School: Day 10

 
Co-Teacher and I had a project left over from last week that we decided to try today: writing acrostic poems. These kids are no strangers to acrostics; they’ve written them throughout the year. After we gave them a list of proper names from the story, they went to work. Or tried to.

While they were pondering what to write, I dashed off four of my own:

Kirsti
Insists that Annemarie
Read a
Story about
The kings and queens
In olden times.

Sweden
Was not in the hands of the
Enemy
During the war; the
Enemy did
Not care about Sweden.

Inge did
Not
Go to Sweden with
Ellen and the Rosens.

Lise
Is
Splattered
Everywhere by a Gestapo car.

OK, OK, the last one is rather grisly, and I shared it only with Co-Teacher, not with the kids. However, I can’t help but think that most of the boys would have relished it, precisely because of the implied guts and gore.

While I scribbled my acrostics, the kids tapped their pencils and stared into space. Most of them ended up stringing together discrete words from the story, like this:

Peter
Ellen
Tantalize
Eating
Resistance

Maybe their lack of creativity was because today was Monday. Or maybe it was because these kids are just plain sick of school (they got only a one-week break between the end of the school year and the start of summer school) and their brains are malfunctioning.

Despite the poor quality of most of the acrostics (it didn’t help that they wrote them on black construction paper in pencil so that I have to squint to read them!), T-Girl’s creation “worked.” You can see it in the photo.

Yeah, she could have improved the placement of the lines on the paper, but I’m not going to be too critical. After all, she’s a kid who usually complains about every assignment (“That’s boring! I don’t want to do that!”), but today she jumped into the project willingly and completed it quickly.

Maybe this is the heart of today’s lesson: Creativity can blossom when you stop complaining.