One of our favorite parts of our morning time is poetry. When they were younger, I used to choose the poems we memorized together and we would recite them every day during morning time until we learned them. Occasionally during the week we reviewed the ones we had learned in the past. We’ve done that for the last 10 years of homeschooling.

Some of the older teens didn’t like being limited to poems that the little kids could learn. Earlier this year they asked if we could all memorize our own poems. Of course I was totally fine with that! So, now our poetry portion of morning time looks a little different.

Our Poetry Time

The kids all pick a poem from our poetry books or online. Then at the beginning of morning time, we listen to classical music for about 5 minutes while we all quietly work on memorizing our individual poems. Then we all take turns reciting what we have learned so far.

This has been wonderful for many reasons. They all have free rein over which poems to choose and consequently enjoy a sense of accomplishment in memorizing their own poem. We encourage each other as we recite, and we delight in the word choice and imagery. This all happens organically; without a curriculum, no in-depth analysis necessary, just pure enjoyment of the beauty and depth of poetry.

Another bonus is that they are all actually learning multiple poems at once, since they are reciting one and then hearing the other poems each day. By the time they hear a poem that many days in a row, (it takes about two weeks to learn most of their poems) they almost have everyone else’s memorized too. I have been learning poems too, building up my repertoire.

Total win all around, and it was my 17 year old son’s idea!! That makes me happy in and of itself, as he is often not excited about “schoolish” things. Poetry is something he has come to enjoy, and he memorizes well even despite having dyslexia and auditory processing disorder, as does my other teenage son.

Enjoying poetry together is one of the most valuable things we have ever done. There is something indescribably satisfying to have these words and images in our minds and hearts. It definitely enlivens the soul!!

Some Poems We Chose

17 yr old son:

• The Bridge Builder by Dromgoole
• Conqueror by Aurin
• Invictus by Henley
• The Day is Done by Longfellow

15 yr old daughter:

• The Captain’s Daughter by Fields
• Little and Great by Mackay
• My Kingdom by Alcott
• The Man Who Fails by Waterhouse
• What I Live For by Banks
• We Are Seven by Wordsworth

13 yr old son:

• Death Be Not Proud by Donne
• Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116
• Your Mission by Gates
• The House by the Side of the Road by Foss
• Crossing the Bar by Tennyson
• The Listeners by Walter de la Mare

I chose:

• Daffodils by Wordsworth
• A Nation’s Strength (excerpt) by Emerson
• A Psalm of Life (excerpt) by Longfellow
• Good Timber by Malloch
• If I Were a Sunbeam by Larcom
• Out in the Fields With God
• The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

Where did we find these poems? Poetry for a Well Educated Heart and the Ambleside Online poetry collections. Another great resource is poetryfoundation.org where you can search by poet, topic, time period, etc. I have listed more of our favorite poetry books in the Poetry for Children post. We are always on the lookout for good poetry collections, so if you have one you love, please comment below.

Northrop Frye, a student of CS Lewis and a brilliant literature critic and professor, said:

“The study of verse is supplemented by the study of prose, and a good prose style in both speech and writing is supposed to be aimed at. But poetry, the main body of which is verse, is always the central powerhouse of a literary education. It contributes, first, the sense of rhythmical energy, the surge and thunder of epic and the sinewy and springing dialogue of Shakespearean drama. It contributes too, as the obverse of this, the sense of leisure, of expert timing of the swing and fall of cadences. Then there is the sense of wit and heightened intelligence, resulting from seeing disciplined words marching along in metrical patterns and in their inevitably right order. And there is the sense of concreteness that we can get only from the poet’s use of metaphor and of visualized imagery. Literary education of this kind, its rhythm and leisure slowly soaking into the body and its wit and concreteness into the mind, can do something to develop a speaking and writing prose style that comes out of the depths of personality and is a genuine expression of it.”