We recapped our exploration of a favourite Robert Frost poem  Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening we visited last year and found this lovely rendition this year: https://youtu.be/ZffGBHBwgzo?si=jin5IBlIODmo52SX

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost (born 1874 died 1963)  

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

This is a beautiful rendition: https://youtu.be/ZQhIZhwoj14

The Road Not Taken By Robert Frost this version is sang https://youtu.be/yrcY-ozQspE?si=-PqRJFytCakzplgI and this is a neat animated version: https://youtu.be/fU0CLxTfoik?si=YF6R_K6HHAmveUGB

Robert reads this himself with starwars similar texts on screen: https://youtu.be/WrqPvSO8SGs?si=gnbbCmfsZ3QNGNGU

Free poem if you have a TPT account which is free to sign up: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Robert-Frosts-The-Road-Not-Taken-Poetry-Lesson-752923

Free leason and links to TPT products:https://litinfocus.com/robert-frosts-the-road-not-taken-lesson-plan-pdf/

Thanks to www.thebestofteacherentrepreneurs.org/2019/11/free-language-arts-lesson-road-not.html for tgis resource:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/The-Road-Not-Taken-Poetry-Circle-Discussion-Activity-171511

e found a lovely free lesson created by Ashley Moon (2019) on the Teach this Poem website: https://poets.org/lesson-plan/teach-poem-stopping-woods-snowy-evening-robert-frost  Barron read the poem and so did I. Our answers to the questions in the lesson: We feel that the woods is symbolic of a conquest and the mood of the poem is subtle and natural. The picture of the wagon on a an open trail with trees around it matches the poem rather perfectly.  The speakers promise might be to get to the end of his journey. He might have repeated the final lines twice to motivate himself to remind himself to keep on pursuing to not give up.

Barron did a lovely job studying and analyzing the poem. He was able to learn a new skill, how to figure out how long someone enjoyed their life by knowing the year the person died and subtracting it from the year the person was born, for example to calculate how many yeas Robert Frost lived you perform the following equation-> 1963-1874=89. Robert Frost lived 89 years of his life.  We were not sure how to define the word frost so Barron looked up in the student dictionary version at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/frost#kidsdictionary  and found it to be defined as the temperature that causes freezing or a covering of tiny ice crystals on a cold surface.

We learnt a bit more about who Robert Frost was from this web source: https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Robert-Frost/274445 

We found that he was an American who was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874 and died on January 29, 1963. His father died when he was 11. He went to live with his Grandparents in Massachusetts. Robert married his high school sweetheart in 1895, her name was Elinor White. In 1900 his grandfather gave him a small farm in New Hampshire. He studied at Dartmouth College and Harvard University and was able to teach. On the farm that his grandfather gave him he tended to the land however he was not successful. He tried for 11 years.  He often found inspiration from walks around his farm. It took him 20 years to be able to make a living as a poet, however when he did he was successful. He won the Pulitzer prizes in 1923, 1930, 1936, and in 1942. He eventually became a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (a job we now call a poet laureate consultant.) He also received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 and President John F. Kennedy invited him to recite his poem The Gift Outright in 1961 at his inauguration (the formal admission of someone to office.)

Learning about the man, mapping his life journey from one side of the map to the other, taking part in a lesson about one of his winter poems lead us into a lovely How to Paint session from Art Classes for Kids on YouTube of a winter night sky where the teacher and the student each paint a version of the night sky. Barron painted the Blue night sky shown and I painted the black night as in the video. Please join us and support this lovely art creator's page: https://youtu.be/Te7l02l9HQk

We found three lovely poems that would suite this art activity by Robert Frost called Birches, A Late Walk, and Fragmentary Blue. These can be enjoyed on the free podcasts read by Becky Crackle from Ohio: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/selected-poems-by-robert-frost/id903845345  We have included one of them below, to read if you would like, that is rather delightful:

B  Birches by Robert Frost 

When I see birches ben to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father's trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches