Poetry Plus Roller Coasters? Yes, Please!

Lindsay Schlegel shares how she’s encouraging her children to explore classic poetry with the help of a new book.

A list and a chart are taped to my fridge this summer, my attempt to keep my house tidy and teach my kids something new. The list contains weekly, daily, and summer-long tasks my kids can do to earn checks on the adjacent chart. When the chart fills up, they will have earned an end-of-season family trip to an amusement park not too far away.

Some of the tasks are chores it’s time they start doing (like helping take out garbage and recycling) while others are chores that should have already been happening, but typically lead to arguments, and thus needed a little motivation (like cleaning the basement).

Thursdays, however, don’t have a chore listed. Instead, the kids are to recite a poem to me by noon. For the child who is just learning to read, the task is to read a short poem aloud, twice or three times if that’s what it takes to smooth it out.

Last year, we used what I now see as a beta version of this system: then there were different tasks alongside poem recitations, and individually the kids earned treats at the ice cream truck at the lake. The problem was that for whatever reason, the truck rarely appeared when we were there. We ended up transferring their earnings to a trip to the bookstore instead, so still kind of a win. Also, this year the kids were bickering a lot at the end of the school year, and my husband and I decided a group effort would bear more fruit than individual ones.

In this system’s first iteration, we were just getting started with poetry as a family, so the kids had freer reign as to which poems they would choose. We have Julie Andrews' Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies by Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton on our shelf already, and they used that. We also borrowed a few Jack Prelutsky books from the library, as he was my favorite growing up.

I discovered a new book this spring that has upped our game. Poems Every Child Should Know by Joseph Pearce is a wonderful collection for children (and adults) of approachable, sometimes familiar, sometimes surprising poetry in the English tradition. Plus, it’s a beautiful book, with a leatherette cover and a ribbon bookmark.

Poems Every Child Should Know

And yet, my kids groaned when I told them at least half of the poems they recite this summer need to come from this book. Perhaps it was the cover (too fancy?), probably it was the fear that these poems wouldn’t be as much fun as the ones they’d grown accustomed to. My solution was to leaf through the book myself and make a list of 9-12 poems per kid for them to choose from. One child got the poems about books. Another got the ones about flowers. Another’s list included adventure and battles.

The grumbling soon subsided, and my kids came to me on a Wednesday telling me they were already ready for the next day’s task. We waited until the appropriate time and there they went—one, two, three. They even taught the two-year-old “Hot Cross Buns,” and while I didn’t intend for him to be involved in this task (besides, he’s too little for the amusement park!), I awarded the kids a check for working together and including him.

The next thing I knew, my older boys were on the couch huddled together over the book, alternating stanzas of a poem by St. John Henry Cardinal Newman for the following week. I’d assigned it to the younger of the two (Henry, as it were), and said he could split it over two weeks because of its length. Instead, the boys asked if they could do it together, with each taking half the poem. The answer, of course, was yes.

Now the book is bouncing from one kid’s hands to another’s, and we are starting to check off the poems on their lists, which I posted inside the back cover so we always know where to find them.

At the start, this system was about earning a trip together as a family, minimizing the bickering and growing as a team. Midway through the summer, it’s still about all that, but we’re doing it with timeless verse that’s good for their minds and souls. The roller coasters I’m sure they’ll earn by summer’s end are just the sprinkles on the sundae.

Ask for Poems Every Child Should Know at your local Catholic bookseller, or order online from Amazon.com or the publisher, TAN Books.

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