Poems are a wonderful way to enrich children’s language skills and teach them about their culture, routine, and the world around them.
Poems can also be useful to expose children to new vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation and sentence structure in an additional language.
Poems that rhyme are particularly enticing to young children in the First Plane of Development (0-6), and appeal to their Sensitive Period for Language and their tendencies for repetition, imitation and communication.
Like books, we want to choose poems that are realistic for children under the age of six, who are still developing their understanding of the world around them, and gaining an understanding of reality vs fantasy.
Even the youngest children enjoy memorizing and repeating poems. We often remember the words to poems we learned as children long into adulthood.
They tend to hold a special place in our hearts and minds.
