April is National Poetry Month. So, this is a great time to encourage your child to pick up a pencil and transport their thoughts onto paper. (Granted, most of our preschool aged children will need some help.) Teresa de Grosbois, children’s author and international speaker, shares some tips for parents trying to help their kids learn how to express themselves efficiently below:
1. When at a heightened emotional state, give children a pencil and paper and suggest they write down how they feel.
2. Have fun! Poetry is about emotion, and be sure to remind your children that expressing any and all emotion in poems is OK – whether it’s happiness, sadness or anger.
3. Clear your mind of thoughts, breathe deeply and see what comes out on paper. Stream of consciousness is a great style, and many times the first thoughts written down are already a form of poetry.
4. Be conscious of the rhyme or repeating rhythm in your poem.
5. When working on rhyming poems, sometimes a trick of the trade to use is working backwards. A lot of times the last line of a verse is the most powerful, so working backwards will prevent you from creating an
anti-climatic ending.
6. Look for opportunities to submit your child’s work for publication. Every parent knows to post their kids work on the fridge. Having it posted as an e-book or in print publication takes their self esteem through the stratosphere.
7. *Personal story: Teresa’s own daughter was encouraged to write this way, after sitting before her paper stumped and uninspired, and actually ended up writing a piece of work that became her first publishing.