Simple Ideas for Poetry in Morning Time

Hi, this is Sheri from the blog OurLifeHomeschooling.com, where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'm going to be talking in this video about poetry. Poetry is something that intimidates a lot of people, but it really shouldn't, and I'm going to share some tips for how you can make poetry enjoyable for you and your kids. Are you intimidated by poetry? Some people feel like it's something that's just a little out of their reach, and so they just stay away from it altogether, and I want to encourage you to just try something that maybe will challenge your thinking a little bit. Poetry is so good for children and adults, because it challenges us to think on a different level. I have found, and I've encouraged my kids, that the first time you read a poem, you may have, maybe just get the gist of it, or you may have no idea at all what it's talking about. But poetry is meant to be read more than one time. A poem should be read several times. Sometimes it may be the fourth or fifth or more times that you've heard a poem, till you begin to grasp what is really being, trying to be portrayed in the poem, or what the meaning is, what the author's intent was. And so it's okay if you read it the first time and you really just are kind of lost in all the words, because poetry is meant to be that way. It's meant to be something that you come to again and again, and each time you understand a little bit more. Here are some reasons that I've listed that I think you should read poetry to your kids. First of all, it improves their vocabulary. Every time we read poems together, we always come across words that are unfamiliar to us. And so we'll just stop and I'll ask everybody what it means, what that word means, and if I don't know, we look it up. Poetry has really been one of the very basic things that we have used to grow our vocabulary, because we come across new words all the time in poetry. Number two, poetry has metaphoric, descriptive language that will challenge your kids and help them understand the concept or the context of a passage in a deeper or a different way than they will be able to do with just a regular reading passage. Number three, it inspires them to think or to feel or act in a certain way. Maybe it will inspire them to be more brave and not be afraid or to try something new. Poetry just leaves you with this, always leaves you with some kind of an emotion. Number four, poetry introduces them to beauty in the spoken and written word. We usually do poetry in morning time. If morning time is unfamiliar to you, I have written several posts about how we have used morning time to simplify our homeschool. I will link them below and you can go to ourlifehomeschooling.com if you want to read more about them. Morning time is the time when we all gather to study the subjects that we love and we really value, but sometimes they get pushed to the wayside in light of the more formal subjects like math, reading, and writing. It's the type of things that we can appreciate together as a group. There are some things in morning time that we do daily, which would be like Bible reading, memory work, current events, things like that. But then there are other subjects that we loop on a regular schedule, and poetry would be one of these. We don't do poetry necessarily every day. We'll loop it and do it every couple days, or sometimes I have even just done it for just a period of time. Maybe I'll do it every day for only a month or for six weeks, and then we just take a break and maybe we'll do picture study or something else. But it's not something that is a daily thing that we do for weeks on end. We either loop it or we do it in a big chunk of time and then move on to something else. Here are some simple ideas for poetry in morning time. As I said again, I encourage my kids not to get discouraged the first time they hear a poem and don't understand it, but every time they listen to it, they're going to grasp more and more of the meaning. You might want to just throw that out to your kids and just help them to understand that poetry is something we come to again and again, and each time we get it a little bit better and understand it a little bit better, and that might help them. The most obvious thing that you can do with poetry is to memorize it. When we memorize, we don't belabor it. We usually open up our morning time folders, we read it once, and that's about it. I might point out something or ask, you know, what does this line mean or what do you think this means? I might ask a vocabulary question, if there's a word that's unfamiliar, does anybody know what this word means? Maybe I'll have a child read just a section a second time, sometimes to mix it up on a different day. I'll have, you know, kids go around and read, so you don't want to keep it too much the same every time. You want to mix it up a little bit, but we just get it out and read it once a day, once or twice, and over time, it just is something that they remember. You know, if you think about in grade school, I remember saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. It wasn't like we were trying to memorize it or anything, we just said it every day, and it didn't take long for us to be familiar with it and to, you know, know it by heart. A second thing you can do is read through poems, so maybe you're not studying just one and memorizing one certain poem, but just enjoying and reading and appreciating a couple different poems. We have a couple books that are collections of poems that we've gone through, and I've shared some of these in my blog post on this subject, so if you'd like to go there and you can see some of the examples of the collections that I've used, but this is nice, you know, maybe I'll read two or three poems, and then the next day we'll read one of the ones from yesterday and then move on to some other ones. A lot of times if you're going through a small collection, kids will ask for certain ones over and over again because they like them, they think they're funny, or they appreciate them for different reasons. If your kids get tired of hearing you read, another option is to have them listen to someone else read a poem. We have found the podcast The Daily Poem, and we really like it. The Daily Poem is a five to eight minute podcast, and the host reads the poem of the day and then maybe gives a little background on the poem or the author, and just talks about the meaning of little parts of it, and then reads it a second time, and that's it. It's very short, but it's always inspiring and always challenges us to think in a new way. Another thing you can try in morning time with poetry, just to mix it up a little bit, is to have your kids write poetry. So after we've been working on memorizing a certain poem for maybe a week or two, sometimes I'll get out just a lined sheet of paper, and my kids like to use colored pencils or gel pens, and I will write the poem, just maybe the first verse or stanza or however your poem is broken up. So they're only writing just short parts every day, and so they will write maybe the first verse, they'll copy it from what I write on the board, and it's colorful, it's short. Every time you write something, it helps you remember it a little bit better. And then the next day, we would just write the next verse, until after a couple days we have finished the poem, then I take their finished poems, I ask them to illustrate just in the margins, you know, draw little pictures or whatever, and I put it into their portfolio, which is just nice for them to have. Something that's similar but not quite the same is to encourage them to look at poetry as art, and even to use it as decor in your house. So rather than giving them a lined paper, you can give them a blank sheet of paper, and give them a little bit of time every day in morning time to write a poem completely out, it can be one that you're memorizing, or it can be one of their choice, and then encourage them again to make it beautiful, to draw pictures, to design the sides and around it, and maybe put just a backdrop behind it, and put it somewhere in your house, and let them actually see poetry as art. Just a reminder again, with anything in morning time, to keep your lessons short. So 5 to 10, at the most 15 minutes for poetry, because the longer we spend on something, the more we lose their interest. Keep your poetry short. And also, for youngest kids, for real young kids, nursery rhymes are their poetry. Don't underestimate the value of nursery rhymes with your 2, 3, and 4 year old, even your baby. This is poetry for them, and they learn it, you'll hear them repeating it through the day. So I hope this is helpful for you, and gives you some ideas and inspiration to try poetry in your morning time. If you are looking for some more detail and some more examples of what I've been talking about in this video, I did a full post on this on ourlifehomeschooling.com. I will link that below this video so that you can go and view that if you'd like to. If you are new to my channel, would you please like and subscribe? I am supported by my viewers. Thanks for stopping by, and I'll see you next time.