A Victorian baby doll wrapped in bunting

Description of Coloring Page: ribbons and bunting, lace and linen, old-fashioned bonnet, antique silver rattle, baby china doll, porcelain or china dolls

Don't forget to drag the png. or jpg into a Word Document and enlarge the image as much as possible before printing it folks. If you have a question about this coloring page, just type into the comment box located directly below this post and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

This doll is singing for her supper!

Description of Coloring Page: striped socks, tiny leather shoes, ruffles, wig, china head, composition limbs, open mouth

Don't forget to drag the png. or jpg into a Word Document and enlarge the image as much as possible before printing it folks. If you have a question about this coloring page, just type into the comment box located directly below this post and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

Cut and assemble a Jumping-Jack Jester

Description of Coloring Page: stripes, diamond shapes, pom poms, face paint, jester costume, movable arms and legs, primary colors plus green, paper toy, This is a mechanical paper doll and requires tiny brass fasteners, mechanical paper doll, paper doll in color

Don't forget to drag the png. or jpg into a Word Document and enlarge the image as much as possible before printing it folks. If you have a question about this coloring page, just type into the comment box located directly below this post and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

O'Kissme San; a doll from Japan mini-book

Cover for "O'Kissme San A Doll From Japan"

       Here is a little doll book craft about a Japanese doll's adventures. Young visitors here may ask their teacher, guardian, or parent to print it out, fold the pages in half, glue together the blank pages and staple or tie miniature book together. Enjoy! Read the Terms of Use.

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This is just one way to assemble mini-books. 
I will share more solutions in a future post.

The baby's toys coloring page

Description of Coloring Page: toys, infant rattles, pacifiers, bottle, clown, rubber duck, layette, circus,

Don't forget to drag the png. or jpg into a Word Document and enlarge the image as much as possible before printing it folks. If you have a question about this coloring page, just type into the comment box located directly below this post and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

The Value, for Children, of Different Classes of Poetry

       In children's reading ballads and other narrative poems will supply stories, and will appeal to the emotional side of a child's nature. Poems of nature will satisfy the girl or boy who loves outdoor beauty, but who, perhaps, has never cared for poetry. I have seldom known a listener, however youthful, who did not thrill in response to Lanier's "Hymns of the Marshes," especially if they were read so as to bring out the exquisite melody which the musician-poet put into them. The large group of miscellaneous lyrics will appeal to the boy's or girl's curiosity about the human heart, whose stirrings he or she is beginning dimly to feel. The love-lyrics, as well as the love parts in the other types of poetry, will do something toward satisfying the girl's desire to know more about the great passion of love which vaguely enfolds her future. There should not be separate reading courses for boys and girls, for they should not be encouraged to develop entirely apart from each other. While it is true, as I have said, that girls like to read about love and boys about battles, it is also true that each should cultivate the tastes of the other. Boys and girls are alike human beings; life will bring love to men as well as to women, and battles to be fought by women as well as by men. It is well that they should both gain high ideals of both the loving and the striving of the life upon which they are entering, side by side.

       The children who are thus trained and encouraged into a habit of reading poetry, and who thus become accustomed to appreciating the true meanings and finer values of life, will meet the world with an armor which is unassailable. However many of the external things of life are denied them, or taken from them; whatever disappointments and sorrows come, these one-time children will have that within their heads and hearts which can console them for material losses, and sustain them in sorrows. For, in the long run, it is what we have inside our heads and hearts that matters, -- both to ourselves and to the world as we touch it. If we learn, all our lives, from the great interpreters of life, the poets, the seers, we too shall see and understand.

Why we need poetry?

• Five Reasons Why We Need Poetry in Schools
• What is the value of poetry?

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How to Cause the Need of Poetry to Be Felt

       The second, the subjective need of the child, is that one which "The Lady of the Lake" met in the instance I mentioned before, in addition to its meeting his first need for a story. It made him feel how much he liked his camp on the lake, -- which means that it satisfied his youthful egotistic need to find his own feelings, inner experiences, thoughts, actually expressed. The boy likes to hear about prowess in battle, heroism, strength, chivalry, -- all the manly virtues, admirations, ideals, which are beginning to dawn in his boy's consciousness. The girl likes to hear about romance, love, even death. They both, if they are nature lovers, like poetic interpretations of nature. Now poetry -- lyric poetry especially -- is the record and expression of just these things. And the better the expression, the better for the boy or girl. Their own conceptions of the sentiments they feel are vague and rudimentary; the things they read express those sentiments fully, and their vague feelings spring, full-armed, into life. How vitally important is it, then, that what they read shall be the highest, the truest expression of the highest and truest feeling! Isn't it better for a girl to get her ideas of romance and of love from "Evelyn Hope," from "Sonnets from the Portuguese," from Tennyson, Shakespeare, and Keats, than from cheap sentimental novels? I do not believe that the reading of good love-poetry will hurt a girl in the least. She will read something about love, -- why not let her read the best, in both fiction and poetry?

 How many lives can you live?

• Why people need poetry
• How many lives can you live?

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Another Reason for the Dislike of Poetry Is Because It Meets No Felt Want

       This brings us to the second answer to our question. The other great reason why boys and girls do not care for poetry is because it does not obviously meet their needs, which are of two kinds: objective and subjective. Their objective need is for stories, -- stories -- stories. Of course they like stories. Why shouldn't they? Stories tell about life, the great adventure which looms, wonderful, mysterious, ahead of them. Boys want stories of action, because for untold generations the man's part in life has been action. Girls want stories of love, of sentiment, because for untold generations the life of the woman has been one of feeling, of emotion. So boys and girls turn eagerly to stories. And the press meets their needs. How willingly it meets their needs, with its flood of cheap adventure, cheap business stories, cheap sentimental tales! Poetry, however, does not meet this desire for stories as well as do novels and tales. You get more story, and you get it quicker, in a novel than in a narrative poem. If, however, a love of the sound and rhythm of poetry has been developed in a child by constant hearing of poetry well read, that child will enjoy "The Lady of the Lake" or any of the great narrative poems when they are read to him or skilfully put in his way. His very love for a story, which on the surface is one reason why he avoids poetry, may be careful tactics on the part of parents and teachers, be made to contribute to his liking for good poetry. It does not obviously meet his need as the novel does; all the more reason for those who are educating him to find ways of helping him to find that which is less obvious. 

 Poetry integrated into life experiences.

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But the Home Can Do Even More in This Direction

       The school, however, is not the only place where children are educated. The home, the father and mother, must bear the greater share in the difficult task. And in this matter, of making girls and boys love poetry by reading it aloud to them, habitually, as a natural part of their everyday lives, the saying of Horace, "If you wish to make me weep, you must first have wept yourself," applies to the parents of the boys and girls. If you wish to make your children read and love poetry, you must first read and love poetry yourself. This is, of course, not true in the cases of children who are born with an unusual love for poetry, which they will satisfy regardless of parental influence; but it is true in the case of the average child. The mother, father, aunt, uncle, or guardian of the child, who reads poetry aloud in the family with affection and understanding, will probably find the child growing up, either a lover of poetry, or, at least, an intelligent critic of it. For whether one care intensely for poetry or not, it is so high and beautiful an interpretation of life that any one who knows nothing of it must always remain uncultivated, only partially educated. In the case of the child who has some natural love for poetry, there will be no difficulty in developing that love, if the proper means be taken. In the case of the child who has not that love, who prefers practical pursuits or outdoor play, the process is both difficult and dangerous. For if too much pressure is brought to bear, the child will feel like a victim, and dislike the sound of a poem all his life.

       A father told me that he had suggested in vain to his twelve-year-old son that he read some poetry. The boy scorned the idea as "silly," and said that "poetry was for girls." So his father let him alone, putting meanwhile into his bookcase Scott's poems, Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses," "The Vision of Sir Launfal," and other carefully-chosen books of poetry. One day the boy, half idly, while looking for something to read, opened "The Lady of the Lake." His father found him absorbed, lost to the world, and when the poem was finished the boy said, "It's a great story, and besides, it makes me feel how much I like my camp on the lake." 

 A Camp Poem

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The Schools Can Help Them Love Poetry

       So much, then, for the fact that young people, in order to keep alive and develop their natural love of poetry, must have it read to them. The schools do much in this line ; I wish they might do more. If every subject a child studies in school, -- history, literature, geography, almost everything except mathematics, -- were in part interpreted by the poetry belonging to that subject, or illustrating it, poetry would become an ordinary part of the child's experience, and he would be immensely refined and ennobled thereby. Since poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," surely we should not give the child the knowledge, and deny him its finer spirit. Take, for instance, "The Battle of Bannockburn." Suppose that every child, in his study of English history, had that poem well read to him at the appropriate time. Children are hero-worshipers, lovers of bravery. Could any expression of heroic courage be more adequate, more moving, than the wonderful lines beginning:

"Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled --"

and moving on with their inspired and inspiring rhythm to their triumphant close? Just the sound of those lines can't help making a child better, because they call out the best in him to meet their greatness. But they must be read to him, well read, by some one who can read poetry because he or she loves and understands it. Here it all depends upon the teacher. To all her other almost superhuman qualities, we add the requirement that she be a good reader of poetry! You see that, while our theory is simple, its practice involves a number of things, -- some of them as yet impossible. 

"We love you know matter what..." 

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One Reason Older Children Dislike Poetry Is Because They Don't Read It Well

       So much for the reason why little children like verses. But children do not stay little; they grow up, and the trailing clouds of glory disappear. The fact that most girls and boys of fourteen do not, of their own accord, read poetry, is as axiomatic as that most little children love verses. What has happened? If rhythm is a human law, why should not a big child feel its power as keenly as does a little one?

       There are, it seems to me, two answers to this question. The first is, that the little child has verses read to him, while the big child is expected to read them to himself. The average boy or girl, entirely unaided, cannot read poetry skillfully enough to bring out its beauty of rhythm, let alone its meaning. Its form looks strange and forced to him; to his untrained mind the thought is "twisted all around to fit the foolish rhymes and feet and things." It is small wonder he docs not like poetry. It would be a greater wonder if he did. The love of verses he had when he was five was based on the sound of those verses. His first rhymes and jingles were read, recited, or sung to him; their rhythm was accentuated by the reader or by the music, and his inborn human sense of rhythm was therefore pleased. If a kindergarten taught songs and verses by the method of making the children sit quietly in their little chairs reading verses to themselves, the songs would be the least popular part of the day's program. But when the kindergarten child becomes the boy or girl of fourteen, he or she is expected to read poetry to himself. This he cannot do, because he doesn't know how to read poetry. I know a woman who disliked poetry intensely until last summer, when, for the first time in her life, she heard a large part of "The Oxford Book of English Verse" read aloud by a man who knew how to read aloud.

       "Why," she said to me, "I never dreamed English poetry was so beautiful! I have always hated every bit I tried to read myself." 

reading poetry versus reciting poetry 

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Why Little Children Love Poetry

       The answer to all these questions is simple, but like most simple things, it goes deep into the heart of life. We live in a rhythmical world, a rhythmical universe. The stars in their courses, the seasons, the tides and waves of the sea, the beat of the human heart, even the measured pace of a horse's sounding hoofs on the road, or a carpenter's unconscious hammer on the new house across the way, -- all these elements, great and small, are moving in accordance with a great natural law, the law of rhythm, of stress. Now a child is a natural creature; he comes into the world intensely, unconsciously subject to the laws of all being, which are the laws of his being. One of the greatest of these laws is that of rhythm,, So the child, when he meets one of his first human problems, -- the relation of speech, of words, to thought, -- takes rather more naturally to rhythmic expression than to prose.

"Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory, do we come

From God, who is our home."

One of these clouds which the child brings with him is his love for rhythmical sound; and this love is satisfied by music or verses. "Poetry," says Wordsworth, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." Just think a moment how much that means when you put it beside the fact that your little boy or girl loves:

"Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night

Sailed off in a wooden shoe."

It means that he has, working dimly within him, together with all the other great forces of nature's laws, this law of rhythm. If you are to educate him aright, you must remember that his love for a musical child-rhyme goes deep into the great spiritual meanings of his life, and is fraught with great possibilities for his future, and through his future, for the better race of men to come. 

 The rhythm of Seuss.

More Related Links:

• Why Do We All Love Rhymes?

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