Our Poetry Lessons

In making these lessons, I had two goals in mind. I wanted beautiful poems for the girls to memorize and a variety of poetry to read daily as part of our literature time.

For memorizing, I started with the following goals in mind. First, I believe the girls can memorize about 20 lines a month for a total of 180 lines for the school year. Second, I wanted a mix of thoughtful God-centered poetry as well as some more secular poetry. Finally, I decided not too include any poems over 20 lines because I didn't want to overload them the first year. Here are the poems that I selected:

What God Hath Promised by Annie Johnson Flint
Who Has Seen the Wind? by Christina G. Rossetti
An Evening Hymn by Thomas Ken
The Arrow and the Song by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Against Quarreling and Fighting by Isaac Watts
Time to Rise by Robert Louis Stevenson
My Gift by Christina Rossetti
Try Again by William Hickson
Loving Jesus by Charles Wesley
Rain by Robert Louis Stevenson
A Child's Prayer by Margaret Bethan-Edwards
The Swing by Robert Louis Stevenson
True Nobility by Edgar Guest
The Coin by Sara Teasdale

I tried to alternate christian and secular prose and vary the length so we didn't tackle two 20 line poems in a row. We'll also use these selections for copywork when the poem is introduced.

For poetry reading, I found a huge collection of online poems at Ambleside Online in their year one section. I copied the poems into a 2 column word document and rearranged them to run August through July. We're reading 1 or 2 poems a day depending on their length.