Friday, December 15, 2006

Sun, not snow, poem


Where I live, we don’t have a “white” Christmas with a snowy landscape. It’s Texas and it’s generally sunny with brown lawns and near 80 degrees tomorrow! So, although I enjoy traditional Christmas rhymes and songs about our “winter wonderland,” we have to acknowledge that there are many places that don’t look like a Currier and Ives lithograph this time of year. So I’m always on the lookout for poems that feature the holiday with a twist. Here’s one of my favorites from Lee Bennett Hopkins’ anthology, Ring Out, Wild Bells.

Sunflakes
by Frank Asch

If sunlight fell like snowflakes,
gleaming yellow and so bright,
we could build a sunman,
we could have a sunball fight,
we could watch the sunflakes
drifting in the sky.
We could go sleighing
in the middle of July
through sundrifts and sunbanks,
we could ride a sunmobile,
and we could touch sunflakes--
I wonder how they’d feel.

from Ring Out, Wild Bells
collected by Lee Bennett Hopkins

*Just for fun, read the poem aloud and invite children to chime in on the word, “sun” wherever it appears in the poem—- to emphasize the contrast between the “sun” words and the usual “snow” images.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have used this with lots of classes of children, usually K. I made a vibrant drawn & laminated sun, taped to a paint stirrer, so even pre-readers can enjoy shouting (or whispering) when the prompt is raised.

Catherine Sjostedt

Sylvia Vardell said...

Hi, Catherine. Thanks for reading and posting. It's so great to hear from you. How ARE you? I hope you and yours are well and thriving!