I absolutely love one thing, my daughter!  She is amazing. I also love writing and because we homeschool that is something I have added a lot of to our curriculum.  We write about everything!  If she is working on history, she is writing about it in either story form, using poetry or writing what she learned.  Same goes for science, geography and of course language arts. So even though this post is about poetry, it is really about writing… anything!

My daughter has loved writing since a young age and has written several chapter books, songs, lots of short stories and of course poetry.  She has a dozen journals going at a time and writes in all of them.  If she is quiet and you can’t find her right away, you know she is outside in the sun quietly writing as quickly as she can.  Her mind is filled with great ideas and marvelous adventures and her hand writes like the wind.

How do you get your daughter to write so much?

I had a friend ask, “How do you get your daughter to write so much?”  I know there are a couple things we have done to foster that love of writing, like having her write about everything she has learned… lol But the biggest influence of her writing is reading.  Yep, plain and simple, we have read to her every single day since she was born (well, almost every single day 😉 ).

My husband and I take turns reading at night for bedtime with her.  One night he reads a chapter in a novel, the next it’s my turn and so it goes back and forth.  Right now Mark is reading Taliesin, by Stephen R. Lawhead and I am reading the Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien, the Lord of the Rings series will be next.  She just finished reading The Search For WondLa by Tony Diterlizzi.  Over the last 10 months she has read 100 books!  Those do not include what we have to do for school or the ones Mark and I read to her either!

Read all kinds of books!

Her love of reading doesn’t just include fantasy, she loves historical fiction and adores biographies.   She has also read quite a few poetry books and is excited to start our new Poetry Tea Time this year.  Check it out here if you want to know more.

She has decided that writing poetry is fun and she sits and writes them in a manner of minutes.  Are they perfect? No.  But they are good, sometimes very good, and I will keep encouraging her every single day.  She has so much to say and I want to make sure she has the ability to share whatever she feels led to share.

Help your kids to learn to love literature!

If you haven’t done so yet, help your kids find a love for literature.  Read to them, read out loud… again, READ OUT LOUD!  Yep, I am shouting!  I am shouting because I am excited and truly believe it is the most amazing tool you have!  If your kids hear you reading, hear the words used correctly, and see you excited over reading, they will love it too and their love for language will grow!  Start out by reading what they will surely love, then move into things they aren’t sure about and see how that goes.  Try all kinds of different kinds of literature.  Magazines, music, poetry, comic books, short chapter books, long ones… doesn’t matter.  Just read 🙂

Remember One Thing!

Remember one thing, when you are reading with them they get something else, your undivided attention.  You are not working on this or that, not on your phone, watching TV or cleaning the house, so you are theirs.  100%!  Being theirs and theirs alone builds strong bonds not easily broken and a confidence and a willingness to do things they otherwise wouldn’t.  You are building relationship!  What can be more exciting than that?

My Daughter’s Poetry

As you can see there are a couple of my daughter’s poems throughout this post.  She is very proud of them and so are we.  She wrote “One Small Flame” while sitting in front of the fire in our back yard in about 2 minutes.  Then she wrote “A Howl in The Night” one morning right after she got up.  Neither were edited by an adult and are completely hers (including the spelling 😉 ).  I of course put them on a picture, but kept them exactly as she wrote them.  I hope you enjoy them.

What do you do?

Do your kids love to write?  How did you foster that love?  If you have some poetry to share that your children wrote I would love to see their work as well.  If you have any questions please feel free to ask!  I love hearing from you!

See more about homeschooling here:

How to conquer disorganization in your school.
What was on your homeschool curriculum list last year?
10 great ways to get your kids excited about writing.

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