Apparently April was Poetry Month. I know this because Benji’s library teacher has been doing a unit on poetry, having the kids write their own poems in various ways.

In one lesson, Benji went around the house and looked for words that were interesting to him or that stood out to him. He picked:

renaissance
manufactory
geography
vulnerability
burdened

Then we had to figure out what some of those meant. At first Benji resisted looking things up in the dictionary: “Dictionaries are for BABIES!” But then I went and got the hefty two-volume Condensed Oxford English Dictionary and thumped it down. I flopped it open to reveal the tiny, dense text and super-thin pages and asked, “Is THIS a book for babies?” His dropped jaw and saucer eyes attested that he accepted that, perhaps, big kids or adults might need dictionaries too.

So he looked up the words, and along the way discovered that the dictionary also contained the words butt and poop, along with a zillion poop-congruent words, including poopnoddy. There’s benefits to looking at real dictionaries. Doing a quick Google search might find the definition faster, but you sure don’t have those fortuitous encounters with surprise words or concepts.

Anyway, we didn’t prod him much in the poem creation. The instructions just said to arrange the words into a poem-like order, so in the end he came up with:

Viking in a manufactory seeking a penny.
Oh vulnerability, you are something else
If a burdened poop renaissance
Oh geography a juel in a eye

He also started another poem, and I can’t remember the ending, but it started like this:

I like it when you poop and pee.
I like it when you play with me.
I like it when you fart.
I like it when you do art.
I like it when… (mommy forgets the rest but it was equally random)

The poem unit doesn’t include Dada poets, but I’m thinking maybe we should do a little extra-curricular unit on that.