As a part of providing a wholistic kind of education to my daughter, we do riches everyday. Riches include hymns, folk songs, music and composer study, art appreciation with artist study, and of course poetry and memory work.
Everyday, we read a new poem, then, like our usual readings, we read the poems just once and then we talk about it. We discuss how she understood the poem, how she felt about it. Then, I would ask her if she'd want to do a sketch interpretation of the poem she just read. Our poetry though has a different step compared to our usual readings and narration. She will have to choose which poem she would want to do a memory work with. She always chooses one that she likes the most. After we've talked about why it's her favorite, we would then start memorizing it and would do so for a week.
When memorizing the poem, we would start with a fill in the blank type of activity. I would read each line but not completely. She would fill in the words that I would omit. Slowly but surely, she would start memorizing the lines even if I only read the first word. Soon enough, she memorizes the entire stanza, then the entire poem.
This activity takes up to 10 minutes max everyday. We do it even during our rest days because well, it's just 10 minutes. If she does find one poem that touched her and wants to include in her keeping, she would make a drawing or a painting of it.
Introducing kids to riches like this has so many benefits. The first and very obvious is that it trains their minds with the memory work. My daughter gets to do memorization but with all the fun because she's the one that chooses what she likes to memorize, not because she has to do it. My father made me memorize the multiplication table when I was a kid and I remember not being to happy about it. But I know that I needed it so I still did so. It's a lot different with my kid's memory work.
There are also instances when we talk about the idiomatic expressions that are used in the poems we read. She learns how to understand those idioms because of poetry. This is where she learned how narration is well, just retelling what she heard, but with poetry, one can express how they feel through words beautifully rhymed.
I also remember how as kids, our teachers would ask us to give examples of rhyming words. It was a really challenging task for me and my classmates to pull out words out of thin air. You know how it is when you do know the things that are being asked of you, but your mind just scrambles because it panics and couldn't find the words.
With the poetry activity we do everyday, the little learner is exposed to tons of rhyming words and gets to hear examples after examples in use every day. I saw her one time writing her own poem. It was just a short poem, but she kinda copied either A.A. Milne or Dr. Seuss' style.
It was morning and I was yawning
because it was very boring
Although moss is like grass,
I had that for breakfast.
She said it was a silly poem and she was giggling the whole time she was writing it. Even when she showed it to her Tatay, she was giggling while she read it aloud to him. I can really say she was enjoying it.
And of course, because we read poetry everyday, she now is able to put in feelings and emotions with how she reads the poems. I was surprised to hear how she read her latest favorite, Bird by William Allingham. I did not catch the first part of her reading because I was just sitting there, listening to her. I was really impressed at how she changed her voice and intonation according to the parts of the poem she was reading.
Education clearly is not just all about grades and medals and places. It should be filled with all the riches that the world and the greatest minds can offer. If you haven't tried poetry with your learners, I encourage you to do so. It is really fun and relaxing. I'm sure your little learners will agree.
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