Poetry Memorization and the Bee

Bee's teacher assigned the kids to memorize and recite a poem--

Jack Frost
by Gabriel Setoun

The door was shut, as doors should be,
Before you went to bed last night;
Yet Jack Frost has got in, you see,
And left your window silver white.

He must have waited till you slept;
And not a single word he spoke,
But pencilled o'er the panes and crept
Away again before you woke.

And now you cannot see the hills
Nor fields that stretch beyond the lane;
But there are fairer things than these
His fingers traced on every pane.

Rocks and castles towering high;
Hills and dales, and streams and fields;
And knights in armor riding by,
With nodding plumes and shining shields.

And here are little boats, and there
Big ships with sails spread to the breeze;
And yonder, palm trees waving fair
On islands set in silver seas,

And butterflies with gauzy wings;
And herds of cows and flocks of sheep;
And fruit and flowers and all the things
You see when you are sound asleep.

For, creeping softly underneath
The door when all the lights are out,
Jack Frost takes every breath you breathe,
And knows the things you think about.

He paints them on the window-pane
In fairy lines with frozen steam;
And when you wake you see again
The lovely things you saw in dream.

Bee told me about this assignment,

the night before it was to be recited

the next day.

I would like to be all "I am so surprised that she laid that on me so late!"--

but it's honestly, 

typical of my children.

What they lack in preparation,

they make up for in confidence, no doubt.

Whereas I hate to be hurried or under duress--

the stress is never worth it to me--

my offspring like the rush, the chase,

the do-or-die-in-an-instant!

They have tremendous confidence,

that's all I can come up with, really.

Who in their right mind waits until the night before,

to memorize such a long poem?

So this is how I helped her memorize that long poem:

I wrote the first letter of each word

on an index card

and two paragraphs or stanzas (?)

to a card.

Then, she read the poem outloud 

to me,

with me,

several times.

I read it to her too,

helping her to hear

the syllables and rhythm.

Then, we replaced one verse at a time

with the first letter of each word

and just kept building on her recall

until she had the whole poem memorized.

We practiced it about 412 times that night,

then a few times in the morning before school.

And ya know what?

It worked.

She got one point taken off--

not for a forgotten word,

but for "enthusiasm" in delivery.

She definitely has t.c.

Her teacher told her she was a *"g."

*that would be "genius".