Rhyme Time - writercize #14

There was a writer who loved to rhyme

to hear a lyric and keep the time.

Right on the beat the words did roll

and touched the reader's very soul.

Perhaps not the most illuminating poem, but a decent example of how by simply using words that rhyme, a thought or idea adopts its own rhythm and beat and sounds like waves, even when reading it to yourself silently.

Rhyming has been used in nursery rhymes (aha!), songs and children's stories as a tool to teach language and important skills and make learning fun and memorable before most citizens were even literate. 

Think of all the nursery rhymes used to teach counting ("One, Two, Buckle My Shoe"), colors ("Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"), life lessons such as the necessity of going to sleep early ("Wee Willie Winkie"), telling time ("Hickory Dickory Dock" and "Monday's Child"), hygiene and more.

When I need to remember how many days there are in any given month, I still resort to "30 days hath September ..." rather than committing the number of days in each month to memory. 

According to Scholastic: "The ability to hear rhymes — knowing that cat rhymes with hat, but not with bag — is an essential skill for learning to read because it means that your child can discern the differences among individual sounds (or phonemes). Playing with rhymes trains her ear to hear the differences and similarities in how words sound."

writing exercise:  Easy peasy exercise today.  Think of one word to rhyme with each of the words below.  If you're feeling adventurous, feel free to elaborate and make a little poem, or series of couplets - I'd love to read it!

• book
• sky
• road
• vine
• pen

(Click "read more" for writercizer sample response.)

writercizer response:

book:  nook

sky:  guy

road:  toad

vine:  line

pen:  when

Take a look, it's in a book ... ok, not me - that's the start of a song from a lovely program I used to watch called Reading Rainbow ... you see the stickiness of rhymes?!?

Falling fast from the sky

was a scared little guy.

He just hoped to be alive

after his first sky-dive.

In the middle of the road

there lived a squat little toad.

Along came a car

and he leapt far

o'er to the grass freshly mowed.

I haven't lifted a pen

since I don't even know when!