Encourage Your Children to Love Poetry
If you’re trying to get your children to learn to love reading, I think studying poetry is a great place to start. Short humorous poems that tell a story tend to appeal to children who are too intimidated to try reading a full length book.
Sir Silly: The World Where Words Play by David Dayan Fisher includes a collection of poems celebrating the silly things that children love. There are poems about dogs, messy rooms, far away places, and cows that say “meow” instead of “moo.”
The poems have the same whimsical appeal as Shel Silverstein’s work, so if your kids like A Light in the Attic or Where the Sidewalk Ends, Sir Silly should be a hit. Many of the poems are just a few lines long, so you could easily help a child to memorize his or her favorites.
My favorite poem from this book is Misplaced Child.
An adult is a child who has lost his way,
Who found his serious and lost his play.
They read the news, moan about work.
The sit in traffic and iron their shirts.
The adult stops the child from play,
As the child does nothing but keep his way.
The silliness of growing up for sure.
The happy child or the adult bore?
While the poems are cute and kid-friendly, I really wish the publisher would have opted for full color illustrations. Even though my son reads very well, I’ve noticed that the first thing that attracts his attention in any book is the pictures.
The tiny black and white doodles in this book don’t do much to draw a child in, so you might need to do some coaxing in order to get your child to start reading. Even Shel Silverstein didn’t hold my son’s attention until I gave him a copy of Don’t Blump the Glump! and the pictures of colorful monsters inspired him to try reading the poems.
You can purchase Sir Silly: The World Where Words Play on Amazon.
Photo credit: Amazon
