Memorizing Simple Poems with Kids {Video}

Hello! I’m guessing you are reading this blog post because you love poetry and want to include it in your homeschool. Great choice! You will love this review for Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization and physical version of the Student Book by Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW). This posts is about memorizing simple poems with kids and guess what? They will love this!

Memorizing Simple Poems with Kids

I am sure many of you have heard and/or used Institute for Excellence in Writing (or IEW) for homeschooling. They have all kinds of programs and curricula that are fun very engaging. Well, Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization won’t disappoint you! Let me give you all of the details as to what I mean. First off, look at how classy their program is! It all fits perfectly in its own self-contained box to keep all of your materials together.

I also love how the CDs are housed in this little brown case. Even my children (four and six years of age) thought it was so fancy! You have the teacher book, the PDF version of the student book and the set of CDs with the poems recorded by level and in order. There are seven MP3 downloads AND a DVD called Nurturing Competent Communicators included in this Poetry set. The physical version of the Student Book is sold separately.

We play the CD during breakfast at home. I don’t make my children sit to listen. They are simply having them in the background and you’ll be surprised at how much they pick up by simply doing this. I played our first CD for a week, every morning and let the CD run through all 19 poems in level 1.

By Monday of the next week, I introduced them to the book with extra copies of the first 3 so my 4-year old daughter could color the pictures. Will you believe me if I told you that by then, they already knew the first two poems and almost had the third one down?! It’s true!

Institute for Excellence in Writing take their job seriously. They only develop the best of materials. I was a bit nervous about starting poetry with my children this early because, even though I love poetry, I wasn’t sure how they would do with a more developed and more rigorous program. Actually, I was pleasantly surprised at how well they picked it up and how well they are doing!

The most important thing was for ME to get over the nervousness. Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization doesn’t just dictate what to do, but they offer tons of super important information on why memorization is important (with research-based facts), why start with memorization early (which is paramount and foundational in the classical education model) as well as how the program works and how to “work it.”

When memorizing simple poems with kids, it has to be just that: simple. Simple for you and simple for the kids. That is exactly what this is. As you can see, the teacher book has the poems with side notes on important fact, interesting findings, relevant historical or cultural tidbits and even some word definitions that meant something specific in the poem because of place or time when it was written.

This kind of information keeps children interested and gives poems a new meaning. They understand them better. This program also provides the CDs with every poem recorded in the order in which it appears in the book. This makes it so simple for both teachers/parents and children to know how to pronounce words, where to put more emotion to words and how words rhyme with each other.

Many of the poems in Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization are witty, which makes poetry fun and engaging for children. Above, you got to watch my children reciting seven of the level 1 poems. You will see how they have fun reciting them and how simple it is to get them to memorize. Imagine how much more they can learn!

Wasn’t that great?! This is just a short list of the ones they know. Right now, we have been memorizing our poems for about 6 weeks during weekdays and they are almost done learning all of the 19 poems in level 1. They are eager to earn their certificate for this level. There are more levels to come, all included in this book. How exciting!

So what do we think of Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization? We LOVE it and will continue doing it longterm. We highly recommend it!