Poetry Challenge for Kids {Week 3}

Welcome back to our very casual, very flexible, very fun Poetry Challenge to get you and your kids reading (and enjoying!) poems during National Poetry Month (and I hope you continue well beyond April). If you missed the introduction, you can read all the challenge details in the first Poetry Challenge for Kids post.

How did it go this past week with the Emily Dickinson poem? My kids enjoyed the Robert Louis Stevenson more, but we did have an interesting conversation about what it means for a word to "live".

Diverging wildly from Dickinson, this week's poem will tickle your funny bone and is a good reminder that poems do not always have to be deep and meaningful. In fact, nonsense rhymes serve an extremely useful purpose. Think of all those nursery rhymes that have been handed down through the generations.

Get a printer friendly pdf copy here ---> Edward Lear poem (I've been tacking each poem above our dining table so we don't forget to read it every day.)

When I was a kid I had a book of Edward Lear's nonsense rhymes. It was filled with limericks that made me giggle. I don't remember most of them, but "There Was and Old Man with a Beard" is one that I can still recite from memory. You may also be familiar with Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat", a poem I also memorized as a kid. It's funny that I can remember things I learned as a kid more easily than things I memorized as an adult. More reason to introduce poetry to your kids right now!

Poetry Challenge Extension Activities:

• Memorize the limerick
• Write your own limericks (keep it clean, please!) based on you and your kids. "There was a young boy from New York...."; or "There was an Old Mom with a book..."
• Read more about Edward Lear
• Read "The Owl and the Pussycat"
• The Gutenberg Project has free digital copies of the works of Edward Lear. Some of them even have illustrations.

Have you been reading poems with your kids this month? I'd love to hear how it's going. You can leave a comment here, or join the conversation on Facebook.

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