Gillian, the poet!

I was cleaning Gillian's room today, and I kept finding notebooks, journals, and pieces of paper put in folders all over the room. Gillian loves to draw, paint, sing, read, play with her brothers, and especially write. She has this amazing imagination that quite often astonishes me. Gillian loves to write stories and then illustrate them herself. She has written many stories, tales, as well as has kept a journal of things that are important to her, like what people say. I also love her art work. It's very pretty and different. She often tells me that she uses colors in her art that describe the person she is thinking of, or the person that she is sending that particular piece to.

But today I want to share something else that Gillian enjoys doing, and that is poetry. It is startling when, while acting out with her brothers various dramatic stories, she would right there and then make up poems, and sometimes they are silly, but usually they are very good. I wished I had written them all down, but she had written some of them down herself in a notebook. I was so happy to find the little poetry book, as she called it. Here are but a few of her fun poems (I'll definitely be more vigilant in recording them in the future):

We see this happy sight
a little bird taking flight.
Its wings are open,
its beak is wide,
its eyes are blue in the morning light.
It sees a worm; it swoops; it dives.
The worm is very over-sized.
Crunch, crunch, crunch...
The worm is gone.

I'm under a rainbow.
The clouds are misty blue.
My face has a reddish hue.
And I'm in love, in love, in real love.

I'm a mean old witch with a hat,
and I fly on broom stick with a cat.
My noise is pointed and my toes are too.
If you don't be careful, I might scare you!
Booo!

There once was a ghost, a meany old ghost.
Ooooo!
He sneaked in the old grave yard.
Ooooo!
He walked on an old grave stone.
Ooooo!
He opened the grave, and...
Boooo!

I saw a little boy named Joe,
he had stubbed his toe,
so he said 'no.'
So I said "Joe, my little Joe,
why did you say 'no?'

Gillian has a natural talent in the creative arts, but I do want to emphasize that if it weren't for the classics which I have read to her since she was very little and which she continues to read herself now, those talents might have not been developed. The language in the classics is so beautiful and rich, and their plots are full of imagination, that any child couldn't help but instill those same qualities in their own language and mind. Just today as I was checking Gillian's homework, I saw that she hadn't followed the directions in her language arts assignment. When I asked her why she hadn't followed directions, she replied that "strong"sounded too boring to her so she had used "husky" instead, and that "weak" didn't feel very positive so she had used "delicate," "nice paintings" seemed too simple so she used "lovely," and so on. She also added that I shouldn't worry what the teacher would say, because her teacher understood her desire for using special words. I do too, Gillian, and I'm so glad to have your creativity and imagination beautify my life.