Writing Poetry

I think I may have programmed my children to be poets.  I often speak to them in rhyme.  I am also known to sing them opera-ish canticles of directives just to hear them laugh.  But the speaking in rhyme I inadvertently started when they were born.  It probably started with this nursery rhyme about Bear I invented.  N– Bear sits in her chair, in her underwear, with a bow in her hair, while eating a pear.  Nothing worthy of a poetry prize, but my daughter ate it up.  I followed it up with some french rhyme about une grenouille qui mange une nouille (a frog who eats a noodle).

I didn’t think Bear would like writing poetry.  But then I ordered Michael Clay Thompson’s Language Arts program – the Island level.  It has poetry writing assignments sprinkled throughout that Bear can’t wait to try.  You want to know my secret?

I do the assignments with her.

She sees me write and wants to try it, too.

Here are some of our poems:

I went for cute with the picture, and just realized some of the poems are hard to read.  The one by me is:
The bird reflects upon/the pond/ The fish returns once more. The bird returns upon/ the pond/ The fish reflects no more.  (We had to use “re” words.  It’s harder than it seems!)  Bear’s “re” poem is: A Red, Red Rose/ That Spring renews/returns/ a reverse from a winter doze.
Her small onomatopoeia poem: Splish, splash, splosh/ Goes the waterfall./ Don’t fall in/ Otherwise you’ll/ Get soaked./ Splish, Splash, Splosh/ Goes the waterfall.
Her larger onomatopoeia poem, which she wrote after I shared mine: Clipittey clop, clipitty clop,/ Goes five-and twenty horses/ Down the street/ Down the street./ Down to the/ Bakery goes/ Five-and twenty horses. (My onomatopoeia poem used clippety clop, but I have misplaced it.)

Our inspiration has been mainly our MCT language arts, but I have noticed her All About Spelling writing assignments becoming more poetic.

The key to children writing poetry is to teach them some figurative language.
Once they know figurative language, it will appear in their regular writing (and maybe even in their speech – see my homeschool moment at the bottom of the post).
Ultimately, my goal is not that Bear be a poetess, but for her to be poetic in her everyday writing.

To make this easy for you, because we all love easy, here are the main, most helpful terms to know for an elementary aged child:

simile, metaphor, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia.

So, now that you have this list, what to do?

Some (fairly simple) writing assignments:

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1. A simile is a comparison using “like” or “as”.  Read the book Quick As a Cricket to illustrate a simile.  Have the children pick something and compare it to another thing using a simile.  Do more than one.  Join in and write one, too.

2. A metaphor is a figure of speech that says that one thing is another different thing.  These can be a bit more challenging to write, especially for children.  Try some with your kids.
Here’s an example: “The rain came down in long knitting needles.” – National Velvet by Enid Bagnold

3. Onomatopoeia is a mouthful, but it is a word that imitates the sound that it represents.  Splash, quack, moo, bang, clang.  The MCT assignment for onomatopoeia was to think of an object or animal and their associated noises and write a few lines using those onomatopoeia words. My Mouth Is a Volcano! is one picture book that not only has plenty of onomatopoeia words in it, but includes a metaphor throughout the whole book.

4. Alliteration is when words close together start with the same sound.  Alliteration is so easy to use in a writing project.  My favorite assignment for my third graders was to have them choose a letter of the alphabet and write a sentence that used mostly words that started with that letter.  “A happy hen hurried home,” for example.  

5. Assonance and consonance are the repeated vowel (assonance) or consonant (consonance) sounds in the middle of words.  For example: The rock wrecked Craig’s skiff.  Or, The rain drained into the tray I left outside.  Try to write a sentence that uses assonance or consonance. If you have any of the Sheep in a Jeep titles (by Nancy Shaw), these are replete with alliteration, assonance, and consonance.  Come to think of it, they also have onomatopoeia.  Most libraries have them.

Writing Poetry Homeschool Moment: Bear was super angry with her brother on Wednesday while I was busily adding to this post.  She comes storming to me and spouts, “The fuming rage of fire burns bright in my body!” with clenched teeth and red face.

And because I wasn’t done talking about poetry, I have a bonus post (How NOT to Neglect Poetry – tips to make sure poetry gets done) all ready for tomorrow.

This is Day 5 of Five Days of Sharing Poetry with your Kids. Read the intro, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Day 4 if you haven’t already.

“Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”

-William Shakespeare

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Why Study Shakespeare?

Shakespeare is notably the most renowned English author in history and so many of our sayings today come from Shakespeare. Isn’t it just logical, then, to introduce our children to such brilliance? You might think, “I never learned any of Shakespeare’s plays before high school, so why do I need to share Shakespeare’s plays with my 6 year-old?” As I stated in my introduction, the earlier we expose our children to beautiful language through great literature, the better writers and thinkers they become. Susan Wise Bauer recommends in her classic, The Well-Trained Mind, that elementary age children read retellings of literary classics so that later, when they are given the originals full of more flowery sentence structures, they will already know the premise and be familiar with the characters. The same holds true for Shakespeare. Read your children the retellings so they may store away the characters and plots for later. So grab a retelling and start reading Shakespeare to your kids!

Memorize Shakespeare Lines

However, don’t stay away from the real thing either. Memorize chunks of Shakespeare.  I have used How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare and appreciated how Ken Ludwig explains the chunks he has deemed important to memorize. Whether or not his choices are indeed the most important is redundant. I’d like to assert that any Shakespeare is good to memorize. The thing is that he takes the passage he wants you to memorize and analyzes it, helps you understand the vocabulary, and leads you through every little bit. See, I never grasped Shakespeare in high school and I have pretty much cowered in a corner hiding from his works ever since, so I needed something well spelled out to jump start my confidence.  

The Next Steps

As we have gained confidence with Shakespeare, we have progressed to his actual plays. We listen as we read along. Our favorite recordings of Shakespeare are the Arkangel recordings. I recommend A Midsummer’s Night Dream or The Tempest as a good first play for younger children. We like to use props to help our listening and reading.

Shakespeare Resources

Free Shakespeare Retellings: Tales from Shakespeare or the audio version, and Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (or its audio version)

Or purchase them if you prefer physical books: Tales from Shakespeare (kindle edition)
or  Beautiful Stories From Shakespeare (free for kindle at the time of writing)

Jim Weiss’ Shakespeare for Children – make sure you listen to samples at his website to make sure you like it before puchasing.  Not everyone likes his reading style.

Ordo Amoris has shared 10 possible passages for memorization.

Shakespeare for the baby crowd?

Do you think children should be read Shakespeare early?  Leave your thoughts in the comments.

This is Day 4 of Five Days of Sharing Poetry with your Kids. Read the intro, Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 if you haven’t already.

Poetry Memorization

You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket – John Adams

Andrew Pudewa* asserts that poetry is essential to linguistic development, and he means not just reading poetry, but memorizing poetry.

Why is that?

Well, unless you have poetry in your brain, you won’t be able to retrieve poetry from your brain. The assertion is that poetry helps students be better writers because to be a good writer, you need a good repertoire of vocabulary, syntax, and grammar, and you aren’t going to pull that out of thin air. You will have learned it and accumulated it by hearing or reading it, and moreover, by having internalized it. Without the internalization portion of that equation, it is less likely that you will write well. Case in point: I used to be a prolific writer and reader. I wrote endless journals both as a teenager and college student, and wrote pretty much everyday until I became a mother. At the same time, I read daily. I devoured books. Not blogs. If you go back and look through my journals (which, actually, I truly hope no one ever will), you will see my writing style changes as a reflection of whatever I was reading at the time. Nowadays, I hardly have time to read beyond the blogs I frequent, and this is largely, largely echoed in my writing. My writing is nowhere as good now as it was when I read quality literature nonstop.

Children repeat what they hear and sadly, a large portion of children hear mostly TV shows and songs. Neither of these will give children reliably correct, sophisticated, artistic repertoires of the English language. What better place to start than with poetry? Start with humorous poems that pull your children in and interest them. I started my 4 year old on Ooey Gooey with great success. He now has memorized more “serious” poems like Four By the Clock, but it took the first poem to get him interested in poetry. He delights in “showing off” by reciting his memorized poems. The memorization is not only going to help his English, and hopefully his writing one day, but it is giving him a sense of accomplishment from what he is capable of.

*We don’t use Andrew Pudewa’s poetry curriculum (just his writing curriculum) but the introduction of the poetry curriculum is available as a sample at his website and is a very good read.

How to Start?

I highly recommend something short and funny if you have never had your children memorize poetry before. This will make them memorize it quickly and then they will want to memorize more. Slowly increase the length of the poems. Pepper in some poems with a more serious tone. Keep reviewing the already memorized poems, because without review, they will disappear from memory.

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Where to Find Poems?

Andrew Pudewa has a sample list of poems from his poetry curriculum.
You can find an anthology of poems fairly easily at the library. My favorite anthology for children is this one by Random House because it has a nice variety of silly and serious poems, short and long poems, and modern and classic poems. We also have many of the titles from the Poetry for Young People picture book series, but if you can only get one book, go for an anthology. Bear started poetry memorization through First Language Lessons. This grammar program has built-in poetry memorization. If you already have a grammar program, but would like to see the poems from First Language Lessons, Jolanthe from Homeschool Creations has made printables of the poems.

A Parting Poem

I was never made to memorize poetry in school; however, I did inflict some poetry memorization on myself in third grade when I found the following poem in a book and felt it’s tug on my heart strings. I wanted that poem forever and the only way I knew to do that was to memorize it.

Keep a Poem in Your Pocket By Beatrice Schenk de Regniers

Keep a poem in your pocket
And a picture in your head
And you’ll never feel lonely
At night when you’re in bed.

The little poem will sing to you
The little picture bring to you
A dozen dreams to dance to you
At night when you’re in bed.

So —

Keep a picture in your pocket
And a poem in your head
And you’ll never feel lonely
At night when you’re in bed.

This is Day 3 of Five Days of Sharing Poetry with your Kids. Read the intro,  Day 1  and Day 2 if you haven’t already.

 “You can never get a cup of tea large enough
or a book long enough to suit me.” ~C.S. Lewis

Poetry teatime makes poetry so anticipated! My children look forward to this one day per week in which we drink tea from special cups and have a special cookie. Tea is sometimes just apple juice poured from the teapot (my son does not care for tea), but the point isn’t what you are eating or drinking. It’s the ceremony of taking out different dishes, eating something you don’t get to eat on the other days, and the loveliness (I hope) of Mommy reading aloud. The kids choose a poem to read aloud as well and practice the cadence of poetry. Poetry teatime just creates wonderful serene memories.

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It’s easy to set up.

Dig out a special tablecloth from your linen closet, or get some special napkins next time you are at Target.

Pull out your nicest glasses or tea cups. Choose a beverage of choice, be it tea or juice or lemonade.

Decide if you will bake something special

or just buy Walkers shortbread.

Maybe cut up some fruit for fruit salad.

Bring a poetry book. These are a few of our favorites.

My two favorite poetry books are not pictured. The first comes with a CD and you can listen to the poems being read. The second is a collection I have had since my teaching days. It has great variety.

Eat and read and enjoy!

This is Day 2 of Five Days of Sharing Poetry with your Kids. Read the intro and Day 1 if you haven’t already.