April is National Poetry Month: An Update on our Poetry Out Loud Project

April is National Poetry Month!  National Poetry month was one of my very favorite parts of being an English/Language Arts teacher before I had kidlets of my own.  For years after I was out of the classroom  I felt I like I was missing out during the month of April.  Perhaps you recall that last year this feeling prompted me to start a family literacy project.  Every evening at supper I began reading  a poem out loud to my kids.  It was a simple idea, inspired by Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 project, because I knew that simple was the only thing that I would be able to commit to.  It started out as me reading one poem each night, but because there are just SO MANY great poems in the world, after a few weeks I changed my mind and started reading three poems every day (unless there was a very long poem that caught my eye).  The original plan was to just read for the month of April, but it turned out that I was having so much fun and experiencing such great results that I decided to extend the project for an entire year.

Here’s the deal:  I may never stop reading 3 poems out loud to my family for the rest of my life.  I love it so much.  At first there was much eye rolling and groaning, especially from Dr. Peds (who couldn’t wait for April to be over and was despondent about the fact that I extended the project).  Over time, though, everyone just came to expect me to read 3 poems and a Bible story every night.  It’s actually motivation for me to stay at the table, since I actually dread family meals even though I’m supposed to like them.

Over the course of the year some of our most hilarious, side splitting family moments have happened at the table, prompted from poetry.  My goal is just to read the poems.  A lot of the time people just listen while they chew.  Sometimes discussions happen.  There have been friendly arguments about symbolism of poems.  There have been debates about what makes a poem good and whether a particular is good.  There have been dissections of poetry.  People have looked up words in the dictionary.  Dr. Peds has heatedly criticized poems only to admit that he really liked them in the end.  We have debated the pros and cons of an author presenting an abstract idea.

Ask the kidlets about the poem “Beautiful Soup” and they’ll all start chanting and singing the poem, even Mr. Trouble on Feet.  It’s become a big family joke for us whenever we have soup, or just out of the blue.  None of them liked the poem, but it has certainly become memorable.

I’ve read classical poems, modern poems, kid poems, nursery rhymes.  I have stacks and stacks of poetry books around the house at this point, and we’ve checked out many from the library.  We’ve read narrative poems, teensy tiny short poems, and poems off all sorts of structure. I’ve read poems from Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac, from Poetry magazine, from the internet.   Any time during the past year that I’ve heard or seen a poem that seems like it might be interesting to read to my family, I’ve stashed it away for supper.  I’m planning on sharing some of my favorite book sources for our poetry out loud project in another post coming soon.