Poetry phobia – early years

I’m one who thought I would never enjoy poetry, but after doing this for almost 6 years now – we have all really come to love our poetry time.  We only do it about once a week, and we keep it at 5 minutes.  We also don’t focus on 1 poet anymore (although we used to – their favorite was Lewis Carrol).  We now are working through “Poems Old and New”.  They have such a variety of poetry in there that there is always at least one poem that we read each time that delights us. After the timer rings, we briefly go around and say which was our favorite poem that we read and why. 

We do poetry 2-3 times a week.  Lately, I’ve been reading aloud 3-6 poems from Favorite Poems Old and New (the number depends on how long they are and how well my DC are listening).  We’ve also used A Child’s Book of Verses and some collections of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.  I have some other children’s poetry anthologies from thrift stores and a printed copy of AO’s year 1 poems.  We sometimes also add in some silly poems as well (like Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelusky).  We focused on one poet from the Poetry Modules for a few weeks last winter…I’ll probably do that next year as well.  

We mostly just read them aloud for pure enjoyment, unless they have questions about one.   It took me awhile to get into it as well…I think I tend to overcomplicate things.  I read a CM blog that scheduled it like we’ve been doing, and it made a huge difference in our poetry readings.  It takes just a few minutes of time and gives them a nice break from more intense subjects (like math or writing).

Thanks for the encouragememt! I want to get into it but have not yet.