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5 Reasons You Need Poetry in Your Homeschool

Parents who homeschool their kids have to face many challenges along the way, and teaching poetry is one of those challenges. Mainly because most of these parents remember poetry lessons as boring. They had to face endless analysis, forced memorization and had no choice about which poetry they wanted to study. However, luckily homeschooled children don’t have to learn that way, and they have the chance to explore and learn the poets they like and actually enjoy the learning process.

Every parent who decides to homeschool their children nowadays has access to all kinds of materials. That includes different poets who write poetry for different ages. For example, any book by Shel Silverstein is appropriate for little children. As they age up, you can implement writers such as Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Bly, etc., as homeschool poetry. Robert Frost is an American Poet who determines significant concepts and emotions through his poems and can even be used for college students. You can also implement essays by Robert Frost to your homeschool plan because, in those essays, there are many good pieces of advice that can help children and give them the base knowledge of poetry. Believe it or not, there is even poetry appropriate for babies, such as the ones that are written by Amy Goldman.

And, of course, those are not the only writers out there. There is poetry suitable for everyone, although, in order to present the beauty of poetry to your kid in the right way, you as a parent will need to spend some time researching through various paper samples, reading essays on this topic, and of course reading the poetry by yourself first until you find the best one that is suited for your kid. And with that, you will give your kid a glimpse into the soul of the writer and a chance to experience the world through the eyes of the poet.

Using poetry in your homeschool can be an amazing addition for the whole family!

5 Reasons You Need Poetry in Your Homeschool

With that said, let’s dive a bit deeper into the reasons why poetry is important for children.

Poetry Enhances Vocabulary

Remembering words and their meaning is way easier to achieve through poetry. This is because the unfamiliar words in a sentence always have context, making them easier to remember. The already familiar words change from meaningless words to words that they can start to use in their everyday life.

Poetry Encourages Memorization Skills

A poem for child to memorize needs to involve rhythms, sequences, and patterns. When the children are practicing the poem, they link their memory with the visual setup and sound of the poem. This develops into a lifelong skill that later on will be useful for every part of education, such as learning new languages and even subjects such as mathematics.

Poetry Develops Reading Comprehension

Most of the time, poems are short texts. This makes them more manageable and easier to read for the kids who struggle with reading. However, longer passages can be hard and overflowing for the new readers. In this case, poetry can help them and ease them into reading comprehension. When your kids start to get more comfortable with reading poetry, they will be willing to read something more challenging and longer. On top of all, the rhyming and rhythm patterns can help the kids predict the following words and even phrases.

Poetry Motivates the Unwilling Writer

Kids can be unwilling to write for many reasons, but since poetry offers a lot of freedom, it may also be out of huge help for this problem. Poetry allows people to express themselves, and by just writing short poems, people can calm the overwhelming feelings. You can even motivate them to do it in a fun way and just ask them to write words that rhyme. Whatever the case, your kid will be writing poetry, which is an amazing thing.

Poetry encourages creative expression.

Poetry gives your kids the same opportunity to express themselves and their feelings just like art and music do. There are emotions and freedom involved when writing poetry. And it is an expression from the hard, which sometimes can be challenging. However, no one expects that urging a kid to reach places in their creative minds, but it is all worth it at the end of the day.

Those five reasons will make every parent willing to try and teach their kids poetry in your homeschool. And the kids will enjoy those benefits and learn lifelong skills just by learning to love the beauty of poetry.

Using poetry in your homeschool can be an amazing addition for the whole family!