Children's Book week: Poetry Day

This week is Children's Book Week , an annual celebration of reading for pleasure for children of primary school age that has been running for the past 80 years. Read more about children's book week and the great work done by the book trust, read my first post of the week. As it is National Poetry Day this post is all about the wonderful world of verse. Poetry is not all about memorising Coleridge for your GSCE English exam, it is about falling in love with rhyme from an early age and carrying that through to adulthood with lots of words that make us smile, laugh, shout and cry. Poetry is a great way to encourage children to express there thoughts and feelings in a creative way and it can offer a lot of fun on the way. For a cheap and fun way to explore poetry, why not write lots of words on scraps of paper and let your little one make up his/her own poems ( you can wrote one too) then read them out loud. 

If you need a bit of inspiration, here are a few of my favourite poetry books/collections for children 

A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by Brian Wildsmith

This is a beautifully illustrated collection of poem, that you can share with your children from a young age but can be kept for a long time once they can read independently. This collection has a lot of poems about animal, that children love and really feeds on the imagination.

Roald Dahl's Song and Verse

A classic collection of Dahl's weird and wonderful tales told through rhyme and verse, offering a vivid exploration of language and full of wonderful illustrations.

Ted Hughes; A collection of children's poems

This collection brings together the poems ted Hughes wrote for children throughout his life. Some of these poem can be read aloud to the very young and some for children to enjoy my themselves in the quiet of the night, before they go to sleep. Your children will still love these into adulthood;beautiful.

Someone I like, compiled by Judith Nicholls and illustrated by Giobanni Manna

Poems that explore an intimate and absorbing into the people in our lives. The full range of human emotions is explored in sections from poets from my different cultures and backgrounds. A great book to help little ones explore their feelings and thinking.

Don't worry if you think these books are too old for your little one, you can always start with some simple rhyming board books, such as the Bear range from Barefoot or of course the classic nursery rhymes that have rhyme at the heart of the songs. One of my favourite nursery rhyme collections is Lavender Blue's Nursery Rhyme collection, a lovely vintage style book full of the classics, that can be passed on from generation to generation.

            

To find other ways to enjoy reading, there are lots activities  for parents, teachers and parents that you can download from the book trust site. You can also find great craft and educational activities on the ' our story ' section of  Barefoot. The theme for this years book week is Heroes and Heroines, so there is plenty of fun to be had dressing up and exploring those imaginative little brains.

For any of you who buy a book from my Barefoot site  Don't forget that if you are new to Barefoot enter TWENTY12 at the checkout to get 20% off your purchase.