Learn These Four Simple Poems with Your Kids

Memorization exercises stretch kids’ brains. With practice, your students can learn to hold longer and longer pieces in their minds.
Moms and dads will benefit from this brain-boosting activity, too.

You can begin poetry memorization with your kids by learning just one or two lines at a time. As their skills improve, you can advance to entire poems. To hook your students’ interest and build their confidence, turn to short poems on topics they’ll enjoy. For starters, give these four simple poems for kids a try.

1. ”Bed in Summer”

When the days grow long, young children can relate to the idea of being sent to bed before the sky is fully dark. As the poem “Bed in Summer” by Robert Louis Stevenson phrases it, “I have to go to bed by day.” This simple piece of poetry is just four stanzas long and uses an AABB rhyme scheme that will help the words stick in your kids’ heads.
You’ll find the poem in Stevenson’s book A Child’s Garden of Verses.

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2. ”The Invitation”

Shel Silverstein’s kid-favorite volume of poetry, Where the Sidewalk Ends, opens with “The Invitation.” In just seven lines, Silverstein welcomes readers from any walk of life to enjoy the magic of poetry. If you want to captivate your kids with the idea that poetry is for everyone, this might be the poem to do it.

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3. ”Mix a Pancake”

Christina Rossetti’s “Mix a Pancake” is one of the best options for short simple poems for young learners. Your kids will especially enjoy this piece if they’re fans of tall stacks of sweet, syrupy pancakes. The poem has only six lines, and four of them end with the word “pancake” — nice and easy to remember! To make the learning even more fun, make a batch of pancakes with your kids, and recite the poem again and again as you flip the flapjacks.

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4. ”A Patch of Old Snow”

Several days after a winter snowfall, point out a pile of half-melted snow, and ask your kids to describe it. Once they’ve come up with their own imagery, share Robert Frost’s poem “A Patch of Old Snow” with them. Frost compares a dirty pile of snow to a scrap of discarded newspaper. After this exercise in figurative language and imaginative thinking, your kids can learn this two-stanza poem.

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For more simple poems that kids can memorize, take a look at LightSail’s Quotations feature. From nursery rhymes to Shakespearean sonnets, you’ll find a wealth of poetry for your kids to learn.
Each piece they commit to memory will increase their capacity for remembering beautiful words.