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Poetry for Children

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Inside: Poetry for Children

Poetry is for everyone.

Forget poetry analysis for now. More than anything, poetry is for enjoying. It makes you feel something. It gives new layers of meaning to ideas.

Percy Bysshe Shelley states it this way:

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”

Everyone benefits from reading poetry…including children.

All About Poetry for Children

There are so many wonderful things that happen to children when they hear, read, and memorize poetry. We encourage you to dive into it with your kids and reap those benefits.

Whether you love it, hate it, or have already read it to your children but don’t know why, here’s why reading poetry with your children is so great.


Benefits of Reading Poetry to Children

Poetry fills the mind with new ways of communicating ideas, thoughts, and feelings. For children, who are daily learning and growing in this ability, that translates to both academic and emotional benefits.

When children read and memorize poetry:

  1. Develops vocabulary
  2. Expands communication skills
  3. Encourages creativity
  4. Improves critical thinking
  5. Promotes empathy

How Does Poetry Do This?

All About Poetry for Children

Poetry accomplishes these things in a few ways.

  • A poet doesn’t have the luxury of thousands of words. They consider each one – does it feel right, sound right, convey the right meaning? This leads to rich language.
  • Rich language, layered meaning, and abstract ideas in poems engage the mind differently than narrative stories. The mind is actively deciphering what a poet is telling you.
  • Poetry uniquely positions you within a poet’s mind. Poems can cause you to temporarily suspend your own feelings and step into someone else’s for a time. That’s empathy, folks.
  • Hearing and understanding an idea or concept from a different angle stretches the mind and offers new perspective.
  • Hearing that new perspective can cause you to ponder how you’d convey the idea or concept differently, which stretches you creatively.

What’s the Point of Memorizing Poetry?

We live in a time when self-expression is paramount. As early as children can hold a pencil, they’re asked to draw or write what they feel. This can cause unnecessary pressure for children who are at the beginning of learning about life.

As we have said before, ’tis better to fill the bucket first.

While they are young, we should furnish children’s minds with beautiful words, thought-provoking ideas, and well-written excerpts. We should help them delight in great examples before requiring them to produce it.

Poetry steps in where plain description fails to express a feeling. When you memorize a poem, it becomes a part of your emotional vocabulary.

When you memorize it, your understanding of the words deepens over time. You can draw it from your mind years later and recognize a new layer of meaning to the words.

Poems are often meant to be spoken aloud to let the words roll over your tongue. Memorizing requires that.

Poems are meant to be savored again and again. Memorizing gives you that gift for a lifetime.

Most of all, memorized poems become a part of your life.


Where to Begin

Poetry should be read, enjoyed, and memorized with your children. But where should you begin? How do you sort through endless options to find ones worth reading and sharing together?

We have two suggestions for you:

  1. Our FREE Poem of the Month resource
  2. Fabulous children’s poetry collections

Read more about our Poem of the Month resource here. It’s always free, and you’ll receive a monthly email with a PDF document containing a wonderful poem, info about the poet, poetry terms and examples, and other poem titles to explore.


Get a NEW Poem Every Month!

Enter your email address using the form below, click subscribe, and you’ll be signed up to receive Poem of the Month emails (plus Learning Through Literature newsletter emails).

Once confirmed, you’ll be redirected to a page with the current month’s poem PDF document. We’ll send a link to each subsequent poem in an email at the beginning the month.


Poems for Kids

We have several favorite poetry collections for children to recommend. With any of these books, simply open to a page and choose one to read. Find a family favorite to memorize. Delight in it.

Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson
A Child’s Garden of Verses
A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers
Around the Year
Between Earth & Sky: Legends of Native American Sacred Places
Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes
A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams
Now We Are Six
Paul Revere’s Ride
When We Were Very Young
Favorite Poems Old and New
The Carnival of the Animals
A Brighter Garden
Where Once There Was a Wood
Favorite Poems of Childhood
The Random House Book of Poetry for Children
Poems to Learn by Heart
Sing a Song of Popcorn: Every Child ‘s Book of Poems
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Poetry for Young People: Robert Frost
Poetry for Young People: William Shakespeare
Poetry for Young People: Walt Whitman
Poetry for Young People: Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry for Young People: Carl Sandburg
Poetry for Young People: Rudyard Kipling
Poetry for Young People: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Poetry for Young People: Robert Louis Stevenson
Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll
Poetry for Young People: Edward Lear
Poetry for Young People: Maya Angelou
Poetry for Young People: African American Poetry
Poetry for Kids: Emily Dickinson
Outside Your Window: A First Book of Nature
Emma’s Poem: The Voice of the Statue of Liberty
Sing a Song of Seasons
A Child’s Book of Poems
Giving Thanks: Poems, Prayers, and Praise Songs of Thanksgiving
I, Too, Am America
Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton
Gladiola Garden

>>> See more Poetry Books for Children 


We hope these ideas encourage you to read and memorize poems as a family. Everyone will be enriched by it, and the connections and memories you make will last a lifetime.


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One Comment

  1. I liked that you said that poetry stretches the mind and provides a new perspective. My daughter loves reading and I want to get her more into poetry for her school. I’ll be sure to find some poetry books that are easy for kids.

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