Do You Use Rhyming and Rhythmic Poetry in your Literacy Classes?

[Josie Whitehead]

The educational neuroscientists are pushing for rhyming and rhythmic poetry to come back in classrooms here in Britain.  Is is the same in the USA?  Look at this article, and there has also been a lot on radio and television on this particular subject:

 

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/A-reason-for-rhyme-52688/

 

It was without thinking consciously about this particular matter that I started, five years ago, to write poems for children in my local school, and they told me they liked rhyming and rhythmic poetry.  They also told me they liked poems which had stories.  I used to take them a poem in every week as a sort of present, ha ha  I am supposed to be a retired teacher, but these children have certainly led me onto a very strange road and one I least expected, for I had only written one small poem for my school newspaper when I was 11 years of age prior to this. Well, these things happen and don't be surprised at turns in your path of life either.

So I am interested to know from American teachers and librarians if this type of poetry is also coming back with a big swing into your classrooms?  I have to say that when I was a child, the poetry we read, ie Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Walter de la Mare and many others was all written in this way and we took to reading like ducks to water.  I didn't have any problems with spellings either because I had seen so many words with the same sounds but with different spellings, cough/off; though/grow; bough/cow etc etc - you will know them all - that it made it very easy to remember them when they were seen in rhyming poems.  

 

I'd love some follow up to this, and I'd love you to come and visit the website I've made where there are many of these poems.  Just Google:  JOSIE'S POEMS  

 

I look forward to your comments though most of all.