I’m just back from Community Meeting at my children’s school, which is a short weekly gathering of all the children in grades PreK-3 (so, ages 4 through 8 or 9 years old) and their parents. Typically at Community Meetings we sing together or listen to presentations from various classes on their studies, but the theme of today’s meeting was poetry. Students were invited to choose, memorize, and a recite a poem to the school community, and it turned out to be a prompt that we really enjoyed as a family!

We spent the last week gathering up the books of poems we had, and reading through them in the evenings before bed to help my daughter choose a poem to memorize. When both of my kids broke out in uncontrollable laughter as I read Eletelephony by Laura E. Richards, I knew we had a winner! We used our time commuting back and forth to school to break the poem down and memorize individual lines, and before I knew it, she had the poem committed to heart. Even my two-year-old can now recite most of it! This morning there were some nerves in the moment, as you might expect from a 5-year-old speaking publicly from memory to a group of 150 or so people, but it was such a good growth opportunity for public speaking. And the poem went off without a hitch!

The director of the Primary Division at my children’s school shared an interesting New York Times article on the value of memorizing poetry, which historically was very common (before the invention of writing, it was the only way to possess a poem) but has mostly fallen out of favor in more recent times (why bother memorizing something when you can simply call it up on your phone at a moment’s notice?). It speaks about the value of diligent work and the benefits that come from challenging ourselves, and also of the way the repetition involved in memorizing draws you closer to words and their meaning, and to the broader world of literature and human experience. I’m eager to have my daughter select another poem for us to learn together, and I’ve really enjoyed the practice of reading poetry together.

What about you? Have you worked with your children to memorize poems, or memorized any as a family? Do you remember reciting poems from memory as a child? And finally, do share any poetry collections you’ve loved reading as a family…I’m hoping to do more of it!

Shannon x

PS: We really love the collection of poems in the above photos, all of which are about animals, both real and imagined. The design of the book is incredible, with such vivid and fantastical pages, some of which unfold to reveal even more riveting illustrations.