I attended a seminar at my state homeschool convention this last summer by Andrew Pudewa. I went away from that seminar with all kinds of ideas about how to teach my children to be good writers. Now to carry all of it out.
One of the things, that I was interested in was his thoughts on poetry. I’ve read in different homeschool books about the value of poetry memorization, but we’ve never done much of it. I purchased A Garden of Verses a long time ago, and we read out of it several times, but the kids weren’t much excited with memorizing any of it. I will say that we have been memorizing hymns, so it’s not that I feel negligent in this area, since most hymns are poems set to music. It’s just that I thought it would be a good exercise. Pudewa proposes that it helps children to develop better writing skills and better vocabulary since often times poetry makes use of obscure vocabulary to make the rhyme or rhythm work out. Another thing that Pudewa said is that boys, in particular, oftentimes don’t like poetry because the verses are so flowery. Yep, that rung true with me. My boys aren’t into doing anything that would be the slightest bit girly. So I bought Pudewa’s collection of poems, Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization, since he promised that it had poetry that would appeal to boys. Well, I have to say, he was right. My boys are having a blast learning this poetry. They don’t even know that it has anything to do with school, because they think it’s so fun.
Here is a video of G’tums saying the first four poems in the book, with a little bonus at the end. Hope you enjoy!
Excuse the poor color of the video.