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Poetry: EVERY Day

As much as I like the idea of loop schedules, they just haven’t clicked for me.  It’s much easier to do things–like reading poems with our kids–every day rather than worrying about whether or not today is a day for poems.  Gretchen Rubin calls this one of her Secrets of Adulthood: “It’s often easier to do things every day than to do it some days.”  Here are a few choices for making poetry a part of your everyday homeschool practice.

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Ambleside

There is a delightful anthology collected by the good women of Ambleside Online.  It’s organized by the month, with each month getting 5 poems for 4 weeks.  Read one every day over tea or just before bed.  That’s all.  Just let the language carry you.

The Writer’s Almanac

Every day Garrison will read to you.  You could do worse.  And the collections made from his daily selections are worthy as well.  You can get Good Poems as an audiobook to hear the poems without the almanac.

Oats + Poems

This is the story of our daily reading: gathering around food, quiet for a few moments, receptive, waiting to hear what comes next.

New York Public Library

To celebrate Poetry Month, the librarians at the New York Public Library recorded 30 of their favorite poems and spoke about why they love it.  Imagine–a month of poems spoken, breathed into life.

Pinterest + Beyond

Follow Kortney ‘s board Poetry Every Day on Pinterest.
I’ve continued to add the the Poetry Every Day Board all month.  And on Friday I’ll open a giveaway of Amy Ludwig VanDerwater’s beautiful book called Forest Has a Song!  Over at Pinterest you can find links to Amy reading some of the poems from Forest or you can find her cultivating the good earth at The Poem Farm.  She also curates an inspiring collection of sketches, poems, and memories at Sharing Our Notebooks.  Every day this month, Amy has been posting an original poem that you can sing.  Often, song is an easy, natural pathway deeper into poetry.  So make sure you come back later in the week!  Amy’s work is not to be missed!

6 Comments

  1. We made poetry part of our everyday routine by incorporating it with our evening read-aloud ritual.

    Every night we read a chapter of our fiction book, a chapter of our nonfiction book, and then three poems — each son chose one and I chose one. 🙂

    We would read poems at other times as well (it’s how we learned our favorites in the first place), but the bedtime poems brought poetry into every single day.

    The first book I found my oldest son reading independently was a book of poetry. <3

    1. So curious about the non-fiction bedtime reading! We do lots of non-fiction picture books, but not chapter books…

      Thank you so for the thoughtful response.

  2. I’m just glad you can’t wrap your head around loop scheduling. I thought I was the only one.

    So far, we just use the selections from our Memoria Press lesson plans, primarily Animals, Animals (Eric Carle) and a Children’s Book of Verse.

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