Poems can create a lifelong love of language in youngsters

“The first sound a child hears is actually a poem, the rhythmic, rhyming beat-beat-beat of a mother’s heart,” writes Jim Trelease in his introduction to Jack Prelutsky’s classic anthology, Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (Knopf, 1986). Trelease, the author of The Read-Aloud Handbook: Sixth Edition (Penguin, 2006), adds that this early experience “sets the stage for a natural and lifelong love of rhythm and rhyme… demonstrated by the ease with which young children learn anything set to music, … the way they are lulled to sleep by the repetitious purr of a motor, and their tendency to sing or hum songs when they are happy.” Parents, youth librarians, and early child-care and education professionals see that natural delight affirmed when they share nursery rhymes, finger plays, and rhyming books with the babies, toddlers, and preschoolers in their lives.

As National Poetry Month approaches, our librarians are getting ready to emphasize poetry in storytimes throughout April. Many of our staff members did that last year, and had such fun that they began to share weekly updates on their storytime poetry on our in-house online discussion group. Youth librarian Brianne Williams expressed it well when she wrote that the preschool years are a perfect time to help families discover the bridge from nursery rhymes to the riches of the library’s poetry collection. She not only included poetry in all of her April storytimes, she displayed poetry books in her storytime room—and the kids “snatched them up” to take home.

Brianne’s preschoolers loved Arnold Adoff’s Touch the Poem (Blue Sky, 2000), with its wonderful, page-filling photographs. Looking at a picture featuring a girl in a tub full of bubbles, the children started to make up their own poems, using words that described the feelings evoked by the visual images.

Another one of our librarians, Kate Carter, enjoyed adding spring poems to her April storytimes, using the new edition of Nibble Nibble (HarperCollins, 2007) by preschool poetry maestro Margaret Wise Brown. Wendell Minor’s engaging paintings of rabbits, mice, birds, and butterflies give the five poems selected from the original 1959 collection a fresh look that works well with today’s groups.

We’ve used the Prelutsky anthology in staff storytime training for years. It nicely illustrates how easy it is to find a poem to go with almost any picture book. Our favorite example is Lillian Schulz’s “Fuzzy Wuzzy, Creepy Crawly,” an eight-line poem that extends the fun and reinforces the simple science of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Philomel, 1969). The collection also includes rhymes to help us laugh at our Oregon rain and investigate all the little things children enjoy, such as squirrels, chicks, crumbs, kittens, ants, hamsters, crayons, and snow.

This year we will celebrate a new anthology featuring more than 60 poems just right for young ones: Jane Yolen and Andrew Fusek Peters’s Here’s a Little Poem: A Very First Book of Poetry (Candlewick, 2007). Polly Dunbar’s full-page illustrations have charmed adults and children alike, while the book’s large size makes it easy to use in storytime.

Either the Yolen and Peters or the Prelutsky anthology is great for creating what librarian Jane Corry describes as “a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the thrill of picking up a book and reading a small part.... And it makes poetry seem like a dessert—so rich that you need only a small piece.”

That’s exactly the message we’d like to get across during National Poetry Month, along with how easily poems can help children develop phonological awareness, a key component of literacy. We also plan to quote Jim Trelease a lot during April. Here’s how he concludes his memorable introduction: “Unlike the toys we buy our children, poems cannot break. Their flavor will last longer than a hundred boxes of candy. They come already assembled and need only one battery—a reader connected to one child. And that reader can start a glow that lasts a lifetime.”