Later this month, I'm taking my mother to a Maya Angelou reading at the Augusta Civic Center. It's pretty darn exciting. Or, I'm excited. My mother doesn't know that we're going because it's an early Mother's Day gift to her.
To keep her in the dark but to get her thinking, I decided that I would send her a post card every day for the next few weeks with a line or two from Maya Angelou's famous poem "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings". This way, she'll get all hyped up about our outing without knowing exactly what's happening. I've included a snaphsot of some of the postcards that I've written out in advance for this project.
I also sent a warning to her on a postcard. She called me the other to confirm that she had, in fact, received this warning. And, she's phoned me most days since with guesses about where we're going. So far, she's not even close. But, I bet she'll be paying closer attention to her mailbox for the next few weeks!
I'm thinking that this might be a cool way to get my students invested in National Poetry Month next year. I think I'll work to document this and offer up some postcards and stamps to my students. They can send friends and/or family members lines of poetry or entire poems on postcards and spread poetic cheer. Right now, students are mailing these postcards for me every morning and they're getting pretty excited about it. Some have mentioned that they want to do it, too. Guess I'll have to add this to my playlist for next April!
