Response to Poem's Lecture

I thought it was interesting in class on Friday March 7, when we began discussing poems. I grew up loving poems, especially the Shel Silverstein collections. It was neat to talk about Mother Goose rhymes, because those were some of the first things that were ever read to me. I did not know that they were uniquely English and that John Newberry had attached the name Mother Goose to them. I also had not really ever thought of the difference between nonsense verse and humorous verse. After the discussion, it made me interested to go back and look at some the familiar poems and see if I could differentiate between the two. Poems are a great way to encourage reading with young children. It expands their vocabulary and allows them to pick out patterns in the words as well as they are just entertaining.