Poetry: "Healing the Wounds Inflicted by Reason"

“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”
― Gustave Flaubert




Poetry can get very technical very fast, which can, if not handled correctly, kill it for children. I tend to focus on the playful aspects of children's poetry, while introducing basic concepts that they can have fun with. For example, while reading poetry I will point out and emphasize/exaggerate the use of rhyming, alliteration, assonance, and the idea of syllables and meter, showing my kids how it "makes it like a song." I tell them outright that some words and phrases can just sound good or fun (a good example here is Tolkien thinking that "Cellar Door" was the most beautiful phrase in the English languag) and there are a lot of people trying to make beautiful sounding phrases and lines.

Kids also enjoy joining in, doing call-and-response portions and chanting the portions of poems that repeat (making it easier for them to remember). Tongue twisters are also a fun way to introduce them to the art of wordplay, and at a young age they can make simple rhymes. The book Let’s Do a Poem! Introducing Poetry to Children has a lot of ideas about how to introduce poetry to children.  

There are a number of children's poets out there (e.g. Jack Prelutsky, A.A Milne, Robert Louis Stevenson), but for my kids Dr. Seuss, Mother Goose, and Shel Silverstein are the funnest and most consistently appealing.

It's easy to revisit the themes in this lesson when driving or in other down time by making alliterative chants that include the kids' names. For example, often when the kids are calling each other names I tell them that those are boring insults, and they have to make it rhyme or alliterate. In addition to distracting them away from maliciously harassing each other, making it a fun game helps them get into the spirit of wordplay and rhyming.

Historically, I briefly go over how before widespread, cheap writing people used to use poetry to be able to memorize lot amounts of verses, and that the first hero stories ever made were told in poems (really, really long poems), but that these poems didn't rhyme, but relied on rhythm, syllables, and lines (I show them an example of those types of poems). A lot of scriptures are these types of poems in other languages. Some languages rhyme easier because their endings are more similar; these languages have very rich musical and poetic traditions. Later on people used poems because they made things sound beautiful and could send a message better than if it was just plainly spoken. For alliterations and rhyming the use of e is easy because it's the most often used letter in English.

I talk to them about my own personal interest in poetry, and in particular the British Romantic poets, and how they'd describe a beautiful scene in a way that made it seem even more beautiful.

Future:

The "Poetry for Young People" is an excellent series that has illustrated versions of some of the easy-to-understand poems by some of the great (Hughes, Frost, Wordworth, etc.). It's a  bit over my kids' heads now, but maybe in a year or two. Another child-oriented poet I enjoy is Eugene Fields, but his common theme of children dying is a little heavy for my children. Again, maybe in a year or two. Similarly, Dead Poets Society is a fun introduction to the joys of poetry, but again it's a bit heavy for a seven-year old.