Happy New Year! It’s been a while since we’ve made new year’s resolutions, but this year we have one. The Terrors received I Am The Seed That Grew The Tree – A Nature Poem for Every Day of The Year edited by Fiona Walters and illustrated by Frann Preston-Gannon for Christmas from their Welsh grandfather, and we’ve been reading each day’s poem between the bedtime story and lullabies. So that’s the resolution, a poem a day for the year with the hard work done for us and all we have to do is leave the book in the right place to remind us.
So far it’s going really well and we’ve been enjoying it, and the Terrors are now quite vocal in demanding their poem at bedtime. That might be because it’s another way to eke out an extra five minutes before lights out, but we’re rolling with it. And we’re already getting some poetic criticism from the overtired terrors, in the form of, I really liked that one, or, that was really pretty, and my favourite, “IS THAT IT??? THAT WAS REALLY SHORT! IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AT LEAST ANOTHER PAGE!!!!” (that was January by John Foster, and personally I thought it was perfectly formed…)
Hopefully reading poetry with children when they’re quite small will prevent that moment in secondary school where they’re confronted with poetry for exam purposes and panic like a horse sighting a cobra. I’ve always loved sifting for the hidden meanings in poems, but I know some people really hate that, so if they can enjoy reading the poems as they stand for now and appreciate them regardless of whether the snow they’re talking about it the kind they’d like to build a snowman in or a metaphor for the weight of possibility stretching out ahead of them then it’s fine.
We like our bedtime poems, and the book is beautiful.
Picture Book Dragons 