Poetry in Your Homeschool: The Power of Consistency

This post shares thoughts on including poetry in your homeschool, one small change we made to help us enjoy poetry even more, and a list of our favorite poetry books for kids!

Consistency is not always my strong suit. I love the excitement of planning for a new year, working out the perfect schedule, and beginning new literature. I will happily plan out an entire year’s worth of beautiful books, field trips, and character-building habits to implement for five children (or more!)… but then comes the hard part: following through. Ugh.

Maybe you’re like me – or maybe you’re the opposite! Maybe the planning and strategizing is the hard part, but once you have that set you can chug happily along your path till the school year (or the world) ends. We each have our strengths, and none is necessarily better than another – though a little self-awareness is helpful for everyone. I’ve been purposefully working harder this year to stay consistent with our school plan, because I know this is hard for me.

However, I recently listened to a podcast from The New Mason Jar about “Composition the Charlotte Mason Way,” and was encouraged by some thoughts about this nemesis of mine, consistency:

“There is no substitute for consistency. It is the most important thing… if you’re being consistent with narration, at least putting your kids in touch with the very best books, it’s all going to come out all right. I just try to encourage people just to do it and not worry so much about the day to day things. No individual narration is of any significance whatsoever. If you have bad narrations all week – oh well! They will get better if you keep doing them, that’s the thing. Consistency matters – individual narrations don’t. It’s the doing it consistently that gives you all the benefits.”

In the podcast she was talking specifically about narration in your homeschool, but this can apply to many areas of homeschool besides narration. For us personally, we’ve been seeing this exact thing happening lately with poetry.

I’ve been attempting for many years to incorporate more poetry into our mornings. We have read quite a bit of it together, but there hasn’t been much rhyme or reason to it – we have usually just picked a poem, read it once, and then a few days later picked another one to read.

It was fine that way – there’s nothing wrong with doing it like that – but this year I made a very simple shift that has been even better.

As with most effective and lasting homeschool habits, it was nothing fancy or expensive or complicated. Because let’s face it: anything fancy or expensive or complicated that we try to add in to our homeschool will probably happen once and then never again. That’s just not how our life works!

homeschool toddler boy sitting on a couching reading poetry

So here it is, our non-fancy, inexpensive (free!), and uncomplicated shift: this year when I pick a poem, I read it to the kids two times in a row every single school day for a week, or maybe even two. Ta-da!

This one simple act of repetition and consistency has made a huge difference. I wish I would have done this sooner, and, as with most simple changes, I often wonder why I didn’t think of it before.

Blame it on ten years of pregnancy/nursing babies/sleep deprivation (which is what I blame all my problems on these days, it works very well and no one questions it). However, better late than never when it comes to finding little tricks to help our homeschool, and this has been a definite improvement for this year.

Because of this small shift, the kids have started to memorize the poems (even without prompting). It’s even turned into a competition (hello, boy home): “I memorized half of it after just one day! Have you memorized it yet?”

Furthermore, we are all noticing more about the poem with each consecutive reading, starting to wonder what some of the big words mean, and, perhaps most importantly, we are enjoying them more! We’ve had discussions about personification and alliteration. We’ve talked about different forms: “This one has two lines together that rhyme – that one had every other line rhyming!”

Poetry is designed to be read aloud, and you could perhaps even argue that it is meant to be memorized. It’s usually not the sort of writing that gives up its treasures easily; you often have to sit with it, think on it, and sit with it some more before its deepest truths are unveiled. If you want to get the most out of poetry in your homeschool, you’ll have to be patient.

Think about your favorite song lyrics – the ones that have stuck with you through years and years, that have meant something significant to you at different seasons in your life – these too are a form of poetry, and they probably wouldn’t have had nearly the same affect on your life if you had only heard it once and then moved on.

It’s also causing me to think about what other areas of our homeschool could benefit from a little extra consistency or repetition. Perhaps, before we give up on a new subject or a new experience, we should make sure we’ve given it a chance; perhaps we should do it every day, or multiple times a day, for several weeks, and just see what happens; in a word, perhaps we should try being consistent.

five homeschool children playing on a playground outside

If you’re looking for a place to start with poetry in your homeschool, here are a few favorite books we’ve used. The last two authors tend to be laugh-out-loud funny, which could be a good place to start for a “reluctant” poetry reader, but the other books have a little more depth to them, with the beautiful language and structure that we love. Either way, I think you’ll find that poetry is well worth your – and your child’s – time.