HappyMama

Granted, it’s a scary world to bring a child into these days.  Along with the spiritual “armor” that Scripture urges us to have, we should also be trying to raise up children who are equipped with reasoning skills and articulate language.  So many teens today (okay, and those in their 20’s, too!) hold conversations flooded with phrases like, “well, like, uh, you know, uhm, well, I dunno, I guess so, well, like, okay I suppose, you know?”  What kind of a Christian defense is that?!  And I’m a victim of this sort of education, too.  (When I write, I constantly have to refer to a dictionary or thesaurus, and I waste time racking my brain trying to recall the word I need.  But more importantly, I have trouble actually putting into words at all what I want to say.)  We can do better with our children.  We need to.  Their faith will be challenged, and we can prepare them with the linguistics necessary to “give an answer for the hope” they will carry.

I’ll admit, when I was growing up, poetry was a geeky thing to bother with.  A man named Andrew Pudewa changed my mind about that!  I heard him speak at a homeschooling conference a while back, and now our 4-year-old practices memorizing poetry on an almost-daily basis.  Pudewa founded an Institute with the sole purpose of helping us teach the next generation to speak intelligently and articulately, and to write well.  He’s also a home schooling father and devout Christian.  Poetry, he says, provides

“a vital but often neglected source of powerful and sophisticated linguistic patterning.”

There is more information on their website. 

Our son has a binder of poems, in groups of 20, and a CD with recordings of each poem that he can listen to, or I will read them to him.  The game-plan is to memorize 20 of them to perfection, have a “party” to celebrate, and then get to work on the next 20.  Sound like something that would be hard to get a child excited about?  I thought it would be, but it isn’t.  He loves it!  Sometimes the silly poems make him giggle to the point that you can’t understand what he’s saying, but the memorization is still there.  We are using the poetry program supplied by the Institute for Excellence in Writing.