Poetry Month

It is poetry month! Or almost the end of poetry month(April is poetry month). I hope you all have been enjoying reading poetry. If you didn't know, well it's not to late you still have a week left! Dash and I only took out two poetry books, but their was plenty in them to read a few poems a day. On April 30th we plan to pick our favorites and then share them with each other. We will read them aloud and then talk about why we chose them. Poetry is really important as a learning tool, but also fun and rhythmic and the same time. Babies love it, even if they don't know what you are talking about they just enjoy the rhythm of your voice as you read it. For older children it's fun to learn to read things that rhyme and have a pattern. Poems are great for learning new vocabulary words. In poems, often to describe things  they use unique words, children will come across words they never read before. Poetry opens a world of metaphors and imagery. Most poems use images to compare things, or use one thing to stand for another. This can be funny, or sometimes confusing, either way it opens the field to let your child express what they think it means, or how they understand it. Poems can also help your child with writing skills, by broadening vocabulary, showing how to write descriptively, teaching how to use metaphors when describing something. Poems teach how to describe emotion and feelings. They teach how to rhyme, and are great when working on phonics and sounds.

Vocabulary exercises to try:
When you come across a word that is unfamiliar look it up in the dictionary, then try and use it correctly in a sentence.

Writing exercises to try: 
Practice writing rhyming sentences. If this seems too hard, try singing the song "down by the bay" and make up your own rhymes, or read "hickory, dickory, dock" and make up some rhymes for each number.
Write stories using  personification. If your child needs some inspiration try watching "Beauty and the Beast" or "Herby: Fully Loaded"

Write a list of metaphors. To get started think of some common ones we hear all the time, like, "my hands are as cold as ice" "time is money" "life is a roller coaster" "the store was a zoo"

For some book ideas Dash and I loved "A Child's Garden of Verses" by Robert Louis Stevenson or "Around the World in Eighty Poems" by James Perry

"A Child's Garden of Verses" by Robert Louis Stevenson is a really nice book. It's all about children. It has poems about their thoughts, imagination, and play.

"Around the World in Eighty Poems" by James Perry was very cultural. It gives you poem from all over the world. It lets you experience different styles of poetry, and fun pictures to go alone with the theme.