LCP Ep 3: How to Study Poetry in your Homeschool

 

Join Katie Glennon as she discusses how to study poetry in your homeschool and shares fun ideas and activities in learning how to appreciate and enjoy poetry. Listen for practical tips in developing language skills in your youngest learners with poetry and valuable practices in building the writing skills in your older learners. Poetry does it all! And you can have fun doing it!

Visit Katie's website for more fun ideas and tips to use in your homeschool at Katie's Homeschool Cottage.

What Can Poetry do for your Youngest Learners?

Poetry can help develop fluency, vocabulary and comprehension skills in your youngest learners.

Short poems with rhyming words (word families) and the rhythm of the poems are great practice for young readers.

Identifying rhyming sounds at the end of the lines of a poem provide a wonderful opportunity in practice with word families.

 

The rhythm or meter in the poem is a wonderful device to assist with fluency and pauses and the rhythm of speech while reading.

Shorter passages are not as overwhelming and can be fun compared to passages in books and are helpful in practicing new vocabulary and sight words.

Poetry can also provide practice in identifying and using different parts of speech in an engaging manner.

What Can Poetry do for your Older Learners?

Older learners also gain language skill development with the rhyming and rhythmnic patterns of poems.

Learning to identify and practice the literary techniques and devices used to paint a picture with words helps older learners appreciate and better understand the use of effective word choice and descriptions in written rhetoric.

Their own writing and self-editing skills are tested as they attempt to follow different poet forms and are forced to read their own work aloud and then change their words to match a specific number of syllables to help their sentences flow or to better describe their thoughts.

Their reading comprehension and higher order thinking skills are also expanded with poetry as they progress and practice reading aloud and answering questions to poems that start out rather simple and move on to more complex poetry.

Book and Poetry Suggestions to Develop Language Skills

Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes

A Child Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

Dr. Seuss books with simple verse and rhymes

The Twentieth Century Poetry Treasury by Jack Prelutsky

The Random House Book of Poetry for Children

Poetry books by Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Light in the Attic

Poems by Edward Lear or E. E. Cummings

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

Inclusion Ideas for Poetry

Read poets or poetry that include historical references or cultural experiences as part of your studies. For example, when studying American History, included some American poets from that time period who wrote poems about the events or people of that time period or poems that mention people or events from American history.

Some American history examples:

Walt Whitman

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Langston Hughes

Gwendolyn Brooks

For World History:

“The Charge of the Light Brigade”

Or “Flanders Fields”

Study poems about seasons, holidays, or nature when studying these topics.

Activities to Have Fun with Poetry in Homeschooling