Experiencing poetry with children

I’m excited to welcome Mystie Winckler as a guest blogger today as we continue celebrating National Poetry Month. 

POETRY IS a wonderful component to add to our school days. It develops language patterns, listening skills, and complex thinking ability. Andrew Pudewa writes:

There is perhaps no greater tool than memorization to seal language patterns into a human brain, and there is perhaps nothing more effective than poetry to provide exactly what we want: reliably correct and sophisticated language patterns.

But poetry can also be intimidating.

Here are some simple steps that my family has taken to incorporate poetry in our homeschool. [Please note that this post contains affiliate links to poetry resources we think your family will love.]

• Add a poetry book to our read-aloud pile and just read 1 or 2 pages. Some of our favorites are Tasha Tudor’s illustrated version of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, A Child’s Book of Poems by Gyo Fujikawa, and T.S. Elliot’s Book of Practical Cats.
• Find picture books that illustrate one narrative poem as a stand-alone story. The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Casey at the Bat, and Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening are some that we have enjoyed.
• Add a poem to our memory work binder. Poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses are a great place to start with young children.
• Listen to poetry in the car using the CD of A Child’s Introduction to Poetry.
• Sing. We often forget that most hymns and folk songs and other good songs are poetry set to music. In ancient times poetry was almost always recited with musical accompaniment. Don’t discount singing together as a family.

Particularly when the children are elementary and younger, focus on introducing and enjoying poems together. Don’t worry about analysis or interpretation or even comprehension. Just let them experience and enjoy poetry at their own level.

Allow the time and space for love and taste to develop before teaching content and analysis. Then the analysis in later years will be more like sharing thoughts about common friends and less like dissecting a dead frog.

Mystie Winckler is a wife, mother, homemaker, and home-educator. Mystie has been married for ten years to her only sweetheart, Matt, a software programmer and web developer; both Matt & Mystie were homeschool graduates themselves. Now they raise & educate their four-going-on-five children. Mystie blogs at Simply Convivial on homemaking, home-educating, reading, and organizing.