Poetry memorization

Ever since the kiddies were young we've done a lot of poetry and rhyme. We started off with lots of  Mother Goose, A. A. Milne, Edward Lear, Stevenson and classic poetry anthologies for children. Along the way they have (with those amazing brains that kids have) memorized whole poems, chunks of poems, or just random phrases. But it's only been in the last year or two that we've started deliberately choosing poems to memorize with B8.   (with R5 we enjoy poetry, but I'm holding off deliberate memorization till he is 6yrs old).

Ambleside Online have poets assigned for each term. I go about poetry memorisation as follows:

a) At the start of the term I print off all the poems for that term by that poet.

b) we spend the first few weeks of term reading the poems and getting to know them. We try and do a bit of poetry every day

c) I (or the child) then choose a poem that has been particularly enjoyable.

d) I print it out and slip it into a plastic wallet that is stuck on the back of the living room door.

e) Every day from then on when we do poetry, the child stands in front of his chosen poem and reads it out loud. He then turns his back to the poem and tries to say it all by memory.

Once he's done that once, we go back to the file of other poems by that poet and I read a couple more
for fun.

We keep this up, until the child can recite the entire poem by memory, and then it goes into his file of memorized poems.

Then we choose another poem by that term's poet and I do the same thing; print it off, slip it in to the plastic wallet stuck on the back of the living room door and the child starts trying to memories that.

He usually memories a couple of poems per term in this way.


Simple, yet effective. Poetry is the gift that keeps on giving, in so many ways, for the whole of the child's life.