Delighting in Poetry

I have never had the pleasure of reading poetry for pleasure. Throughout my school career, poems were just something to memorize and to recite in front of a class - "Three Little Kittens" in Grade 3, "Invictus" in high school. It was distressing more than it was pleasurable!

As a homeschooling mama, I am always challenged to overcome old fears and prejudices, to go beyond my very comfortable comfort zone, to like what I would rather not like at all – dogs, onions, and yes, poems. 

We have been delighting in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses for more than a year now. Perhaps because we are reading for pleasure, we have indeed found pleasure in the simple rhyming verses that speak about the world of children.We have also discovered that we can make poetry come alive the same way that we do our well-loved picture books – by using it as our springboard for learning, by pretending, by delighting in it. 

I will leave you with some beautiful words from Holly Goes Lightly about why we should instill a love of poetry in children:

“Use poetry to teach history, science, and religion. Teach poetry to help your child express herself through words. Read poetry in order to laugh out loud. Whisper poetry to lull your child to sleep. Help your child embrace poetry for no other reason than that it is a stepping stone between the concrete world and that dreamy otherworld that is our imagination.”

Make magic!

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