This little wordsmithing kit has been travelling around with me for 20 years!
Whether you want to make one for yourself,
unlock the Sylvia Plath lurking in your teenager,
or put your kids in a genuinely funky Back to School mood,
just be warned:
ROCK POETRY IS ABSOLUTELY ADDICTIVE!!
I pulled out my one of a kind vintage 90s modge-podged poetry case this weekend.
And disappeared down the rabbit hole for a couple of hours….
Ga-ga, gonzo, totally absorbed and obsessed; it must have looked hilarious —
me fending off the baby from swatting, stealing, sucking and otherwise scrabbling my hard work…
my 11 year old having to physically remove me from the poetry site when my real duties of motherhood became too urgent to ignore….(ummmm, multiple times!)
me sneaking down in the middle of the night to finish my poem….
It doesn’t get much better than this!
Tactile, weighty, satisfying, inspiring manipulatives for budding writers.
I was 17 or so when my best friends and I went down to the local river to find these rocks.
We used permanent sharpies and wrote awesome words on both sides.
Found out you also need a lot of those little joining words if you want the poetry to flow —
“and, the, like, so, if, they, etc.”
Writing the words is half the fun!
In fact, I’m going down to the river tomorrow to get some more blank stones.
For a Kids Starter Kit you might want to do just alphabet rocks.
Or load it with lots of great simple rhyming words for young poets —
Ride. Side. Lied. Tried. Fried. Cried. Bride.
And lots of descriptive words and verbs of course.
(Digging through my case is like an expedition into the calcified rock formations of my 17 year old mind!)
Oh — and another step that is very satisfying and mesmerizing is washing the rocks.
(Perfect busy work for the younger ones).
You can use any kind of carrying case to house your word rocks.
I particularly love mine — it’s strong enough to hold the weight and the locking clasps add special intrigue.
And the durable, timeless veneer of SPIN magazine circa 1997….
Silverchair, Presidents of the United States of America, Lisa Loeb, Alanis Morisette, Smashing Pumpkins…
A simple collage with packing tape — which is another great ‘make work’ project for the kids!
Pretty straight forward, but freaking awesome.
Wouldn’t you know it — one of those good old high school friends of mine messaged me the other day that she was playing with hers too 🙂
Here’s the poem I wrote!
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