"The Months"

Title: The Random House Book of Poetry for Children

Selected by: Jack Prelutsky

Illustrator: Arnold Lobel

Publisher: Random House: New York, 1983

ISBN #: 0394850106

    Children love words, rhyme, rhythm and beat, so they are already lovers of poetry. Most parents sing lullabies and read poetry stories to children when they are young so this is helping them learn. As long as the sounds have rhyme and rhythm they will stick in a child's mind. When children are learning how to talk they play with sounds. They sing, they listen and they repeat. How many times have you heard "I'm a little tea pot", "The itsy, bitsy spider" or "Mary had a little a lamb"? These songs are poems that teach children about rhyming. The repetitive nature of these songs help their brains develop, grow and expand. Reading and listening to poems also helps children memorize words and phrases they be unfamiliar with. By memorizing poems they are learning to listen, speak, write, and read words just by memorization.
    The book "The Random House Book of Poetry for Children" is a great book to invest in whether it is for home or for school. I choose to discuss a poem from this book because there are over 500 poems to choose from and they are all child friendly. I choose to focus on a poem  called "The Months". This poem is exactly what it sounds like it would be about, the months. The poem describes each month according to what weather that particular month will bring, which types of flowers will sprout, and even which types of fruit will grow. The descriptions in this poem are a great way for children to understand the different seasons. Younger children, such as pre-school and kindergarten students struggle with learning the order in which the months occur, so having them learn this poem can help them to remember. Since this poem has repetition, rhythm, and rhyming language it is a great tool to keep in the classroom when teaching the months and seasons.
    When I was younger I had a very similar book that I looked through every night. Each night I would find and read a new poem. Some poems were funny some were sad, but I learned so many new and exciting things from exploring the world of poems. Poems are a great form of expressing one's feelings. I also remember creating my own poem book because I enjoyed reading the poems in that book so much! To this day I still have the poem book I created and every now and then I go through it. I believe that reading and writing poems helped me to develop my own writing technique, and opened my eyes to a world of free expression. Children need a safe place for expressing their feelings and I think having them keep a writing journal in school is a great way to help them do so.