A Grand Adventure is About to Begin...
Morag Styles, a professor of children’s poetry at Cambridge University, explains that children are hardwired with an “instinctual rhythm.” From the time they first enter the world, before they have even begun to comprehend spoken language, we rock them back and forth and pat them on the back until they fall asleep (2011). As they begin to speak, they hear words and repeat them over and over and turn them into songs and behave just like mini poets. Why is children’s poetry such an important form of artwork? J. Patrick Lewis is a celebrated writer of children's poetry. Sometimes his poems are silly, they might not seem to make sense. Sometimes they're about bugs and sometimes they’re about toys and you usually don’t have to dig too deep to find the meaning. But if you think about poetry and what its true purpose is—any poetry for anybody—it seeks to help us all make sense of the world around us and how we fit into it. For most adults, it’s hard to remember what it was like to be five years old and what kinds of thoughts went through our minds. Poems, no matter what the subject, offer children a new experience. Like other poets in this genre, Lewis's work stimulates the imagination and is full of surprises. He offers experiences that stimulate a child's natural sense of rhythm and expose them to a unique use of language. What they read allows them to think about things that may never have considered thinking about before! Poetry is a way for their young minds to begin to explore this world. If children can learn to love poetry early on, then there is hope that their appreciation for it will grow with them. |
Read more about children's poetry at Ryan's website...
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