Saturday, January 31, 2009

Thoughts on Poetry part 2

"Recitation and committing to memory are not necessarily the same thing, and it is well to store a child's memory with a good deal of poetry, learnt without labour." CM Vol. 1, pg. 224 I certainly haven't been as consistent as I had hoped to be since my last post on this topic but we have made progress regardless. Emily memorized her poem after only 3 readings and the fun part is that the other kids did memorized hers right along with her. Tom is very close to having his completed and Alissa has conquered the first part of hers as well as Tom and Emily's. I've even noticed that I am memorizing these poems right along with them! A couple of things that I have noticed while we have "not" been memorizing is that often in the beginning they don't get all of the correct words in but they are able to "tell back" the main gist of the poem. Alissa does not understand most of the words in her poem but she has only asked me about a few of them for explanations, but she can relate what the poem is talking about using her own words and those of the poem. Also, since my kids are still not complete independent readers I do read all of the poems aloud to them so everyone is memorizing each other's  poems. So far this has not confused them in the least and I'll just have to keep tabs on how well they can remember their own poems and not confuse it with the other poems. If I see this becoming a problem I will either have to read their poems to them separately or we'll just all work on one poem at a time together. I have decided that for our scripture memory we will all be working on one passage at a time. Since I have been rather neglectful of this I am committing to start on Psalm 1 this coming Monday. Another item that I hadn't of thought of practicing until reading Jacci's post was to have them recite properly. Emily has done a good job with expression but tends to rush it a bit. "I hope that my readers will train their children in the art of recitation; in the coming days, more even than in our own will it behove every educated man and woman to be able to speak effectively in public; and, in learning to recite you learn to speak." CM Vol. 1, pg. 224 I do have a video clip of Emily's recitation but I haven't had time to figure out how to post it.

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