There's Nothing Like Gardening

Preschool children: 

Gardening:  Print thispicture for your child to color and discuss with you.  One sentence lets you record your child’s thoughts at this age and has a line for you to share your own thoughts with your child.

School agers: 

Gardening:  There’s nothing like a garden.  Print this page and use it to write a story about a garden you’ve seen or worked in.  What did you do?  What grew there?  Did you have fun?

Teens/Adults:

Essay prompt:  People often call our childhood years the formative years when the seeds of knowledge and morals are planted in a child.  Based on your upbringing, what seeds do you feel have been planted in you, what will grow from them, and what fruit do you expect to reap?

Poetry prompt:  Write a cento (a poem made up of lines written by other poets) or a mixed canto (a poem which intersperses lines from other poets with lines of one’s own) using a “seed” line from a famous poem.

Some suggestions: 

• Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary (Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”)
• I like to see it lap the miles (Emily Dickinson, “I Like to See It Lap the Miles”)
• An' the Gobble-uns 'll git you/Ef you/Don't/Watch/Out! (James Whitcomb Riley, “Little Orphant Annie”)
• I am the master of my fate (William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”)

Other popular lines of poetry can be found at http://blog.inkyfool.com/2012/01/fifty-most-quoted-lines-of-poetry.html.

Lifestory prompt1:  (Monday) There’s nothing like a summer garden.  Tell us about a summer garden you have had.

If you would like (and if it is okay with your parent or guardian), you can sign a submission form and return the form and your writing to the library.  Stories will be posted together on this blog beginning in November and in a book in the spring of 2014.