Poetry Challenge #230-Pizza Party
Here’s all the excuse you need. . .
Give me a P!
Give me an I!
Give me a Z!
Give me another Z!
Give me an A!
What are we talking about? PIZZA!
Yep, February 9th is officially National Pizza Day. A day set aside specifically to honor-eat-make-eat-celebrate-eat-read about pizza. Let’s start with these fun pizza facts from Giovanni:
Every second, Americans order 350 slices of pizza.
Every day, Americans eat about 100 acres of pizza.
On average, each American eats 23 pounds of pizza every year. (and puts on 23#…)
The most popular pizza topping is pepperoni.
The world’s first pizza, largest pizza, longest pizza were all made in Italy. *
But, the real question and inspiration this prompt is: Who Wants Pizza???
Poetry Challenge #230
Pizza Party
Ding-Dong! Surprise! It’s a pizza party and you’re invited.
Begin by writing a shopping list of pizza toppings—at least 10!
Cut the list into bits—one word per bit.
Stir the bits, toss them into the air as one would a pizza crust, and then scoop them up and arrange them into a tasty pizza of a poem.
Feel free to add more or delete some, after all you’re the pizza chef!
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Let’s get this Pizza Party started!
*The world’s record for the largest round pizza ever made was set in Rome, Italy on Dec 13, 2012. How big was it? The pizza was so big, they named it Octavio! Octavio stretched more than 130 feet across, bigger than 1 ½ baseball fields and weighed 51, 257 pounds! It took 19,000 pounds of flour, 10,000 pounds of tomato sauce, 8800 pounds of mozzarella cheese, 1488 pounds of margarine, 551 pounds of rock salt, 220 pounds of lettuce, 55 pounds of vinegar and two full days to bake it. “The dough had to be baked in more than 5000 batches over a 48-hour period.”
The longest pizza ever made looked like a pizza sidewalk and was more than a mile long! In 2016, 250 pizza chefs from around the world gathered in Naples, Italy to construct a margherita pizza that stretched “1853.88 meters, which is approximately 6082.28 feet, or 1.15 miles.” It took more than 4400 pounds of flour, 3500 pounds of tomatoes, 4400 pounds of mozzarella, 200 liters of oil, and 66 pounds of basil to make the pizza.
Hungry for more? Here’s a round-up of pizza picture books from pocketofpreschool.com.
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2000+ days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #228-Got My Greens
I took a parenting class once…once. I was a new mother far from family and needed help. The facilitator, Gordon, the father of six, doled out advice coated in candy, nuggets such as “perfectly normal.” And “Why would a kid want to eat green? Grass is green and dogs pee on it.”
“Why would a kid want to eat green? Grass is green and dogs pee on it.”
Happy National Green Juice Day! (celebrated every Jan 26th—definitely not Gordon’s idea.) According to National Day Calendar, Green Juice Day was declared in 2016 by Evolution Fresh, a juice making company (surprise surprise) “as a way to empower people to press ahead with their wellness resolutions by drinking a green juice.” Go Green Team are community organization working to conserve & preserve our planet from the grass up—both are good for you!
Poetry Challenge #228
Got My Greens
Take a moment—perhaps while blending up a tasty brew of kale, broccoli, spinach and honeydew…yum—and think green thoughts.
What images pop into your head when you imagine “green”? Is it trees in a shady glen? The Greenbay Packers? Dang, I forgot to take out the recycles? Green with envy, Greenbacks, or The Green Green Grass of Home ala Tom Jones?
Write a free verse poem inspired by your green imagining—with a hitch. Be free with your ideas and words, but . . . add structure to your poem by varying line lengths using a long/short or short/long pattern. The first line can be as long as you like, but the second can only have one or two words (or vice versa) and so on.
Think Green!
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
*Another “greene” worth celebrating—or not—Jan 26, 1875, George F. Greene of Kalamazoo, Michigan was granted a patent for an “electromagnetic dental tool,” the first electric drill designed for dental work.
Need green inspiration? Here are 2 favorite green picture books, Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger and Green on Green by Dianne White and Felicita Sala.
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2000+ days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #227-Popcorn
I’m missing movie popcorn: light, airy, crunchy, salty, buttery bites that grease up your dry skin. Mmmmm! And makes movie-watching oh so tasty!
The first single pops that grow faster and faster until clouds of popped corn flow over the sides of the pan.
Those red and white striped cardboard containers that pop into shape. Or the waxed bags filled until one more piece can’t balance. The smell! The taste!
Poetry Challenge #227
Movie Popcorn
Think of something you miss. Maybe it’s a favorite food. Maybe it’s summer since it’s January. Maybe it’s the sun on a cloudy day. Maybe it’s a friend or relative or pet.
Whatever it is, write an acrostic poem about it using the letters POPCORN as the first letters for your seven lines.
Be descriptive. Make your reader miss the thing too.
“Each acrostic poem has a topic idea running down the left side of the poem. Each letter in the topic word has a new thought that runs off the side from left to right and is relevant to the topic word. The topic word is typically the title as well.”—definition and examples on KidZonePoetry
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2000+ days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #217-I'll Be True As Long As . . .
Getting forgetful? I am. So I’m keeping this short and sweet in hopes it will help us remember for that’s what today, National Forget Me Not Day (Nov 10th) is all about: Not Forgetting.
The Alpine Forget Me Not is the Alaskan state flower, chosen in 1917 for it’s “true blue” color. That term “true blue” originally comes from the indigo-dyed cloth made in Coventry, England in the Middle Ages, reported not to fade, but rather to keep its “true” color no matter how many times it was washed. And from that beginning, the term came to mean people who are “always the same and like themselves”—true blue.
Poetry Challenge #217
I’ll be True as Long as You . . .
Go back, back, far as you can remember to one true-blue friend from your past. Or that someone to whom you have been a true-blue friend. Using a truly blue pen, pencil, or crayon, write that person’s name vertically down the center of a paper.
Write an acrostic poem about that true-blue person, a true-blue moment, or qualities that make them true-blue. As you write, fill in the lines on either side of the letters, so when the poem is finished, that person’s name with remain steadfastly in the middle.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2000+ days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #166-Princess Day!
Spit-shine your tiara! Bust out the sparkle gown and magic wand! Tra-La Tra-Lay It’s National Princess Day (November 18th). The one day of the year where we can all unapologetically unleash our inner princess!
We certainly are fascinated by the royals: princesses and princes, kings and queens, knights and castles. We love stories about kingdoms and dragons.
Poetry Challenge #166
Princess for Today!
Choose one of the words above or think of your own and write an acrostic poem using that word as your title and subject. (To write an acrostic, write one letter of your chosen word on each line going down the page and use that letter as the first letter for the line.)
Set your time for 7 minutes
Set your intentions to Royal
Start writing! Don’t think too much—just do it!
For Your Viewing Pleasure: Princess Movies!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 1680 days ago! (without a miss!!!) We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl): SUBSCRIBE TO THE FISHBOWL