Poetry for preschoolers
a slightly bananas look at poems little kids like
Recently, a reader asked me about poem recommendations for preschoolers. It was a delightful question, even more so because it came from a reader. The idea of something I write having readers never stops delighting me. These words are being read! I could make you say “banana!”1
Anyhow, now that we’ve finished laughing about bananas, back to the question. I was delighted by it, but didn’t quickly have an answer. Of course there are lots of great poems from kids by poets writing for kids, like Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, but I didn’t find myself reading them that much to my preschooler. There are great online compilations of kid-friendly poetry, like the one at Poets.org. With my elementary school students, I often turn to the anthologies A Family of Poems and Talking to the Sun, which are both beautifully illustrated. Preschoolers would connect with many poems in them, especially the first book. And everyone who reads them, young and old, loves The Lost Words and The Lost Spells.
The poetry my child and I turn to the most is A Child’s Garden of Verses. (We have a beautiful edition illustrated with pictures from many editions since the book first appeared in 1885.) There are certainly a few poems here that I skip, as they haven’t aged well, but mostly the book expresses the deep wonder, imagination, and adventurousness of childhood. We’ve read it again and again. But there must be more, right?
Perhaps “Jellyfish” by Marianne Moore, or “Afternoon on a Hill” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, or “Who has Seen the Wind?” by Christina Rossetti. But mostly, I was drawing a blank. Then I realized why:
Picture books ARE poetry
We weren’t reading a lot of official poetry, because everything else we read was already poetry. Picture books (most good ones anyway) are written in precise and musical language with clear images and emotions, and illuminate the world’s magic. If that’s not poetry, what is? Plus, they have pictures.
And yes, I’m talking about books that heap on the word play, like Sheep in a Jeep and Jamberry, and ones that have gentler rhymes as they go deeper into ideas and stories, like A House is a House for Me and Goodnight Moon. (And yes, there are terrible saccharine cutesy-rhymed picture books just like there are terrible saccharine cutesy-rhymed poems and the easy disposal of these books is just one of the many great things about free street libraries.) But I’m also talking about straight-up story books, because any book that holds up to being read nine bazillion times had better have a good cadence and luminous something, at which point, boom: poetry.
I hope this is helpful, dear readers
Maybe this isn’t quite the answer you were looking for, and I hope I’ve given you some official poems to start with anyhow.2 But my answer is really just: picture books. Reading picture books is a rich immersion in everything poetic, everything that language does. Which may be why story time remains one of the best times of the day.
Kid lit reference: We Are in a Book by Mo Willems
Please add more in the comments if you like!