A Time for Rhyme, 3

Rhyming is easy!

Remember, you need an idea (have a thought once in a while, OK?) and you need some good rhyming words. Sitting in the dentist office always brings on a few ideas. Rhyming is the only way I've found to have fun waiting for my turn in the chair. You can find a lot of nice rhymes for drill. (Don't forget bill.)

In the first two lessons you have found how easy it is to write a rhyming poem. This lesson is to make it even easier!

You don't have to rhyme every line!

This time we will only rhyme the second and fourth lines in each verse. What a deal, four lines of poetry with only two rhyming words. (A four line verse is called a quatrain—we lose a lot of kids —and adults— with that word. I won't use it again in this lesson and suggest you don't either. It's a thing to be used by trained professionals. Actually, I brought it up so you won't be blind-sided by poetry talk and to prepare you in case your kids insists on using precise terminology.)

No. Rhyming only two lines is not cheating. You will find that the majority of poems written for children will use this rhyme scheme. Let's try a silly summer poem.

Now we will have another good rhyming family to use: the -oo ending words! This is another fun group for you to add to the -oon, -ay, and -eez families. So you can write about everything and have plenty of friendly words to put at the ends of lines AND you only need two in a four line verse.

Here's a summer -oo thing I just whipped up:

The old syllable chin trick!

A quick thing here about meter. You can study meter (they call it scansion) but we'll not let it get confusing. Let's just check it now by counting the syllables in each line. Is that a pain? Not with the chin trick. Put your elbow on the table. Rest your chin in palm of your hand. Nestle it down in there. Now read a line. Every time your chin pushes your hand down is a syllable. Try it, your syllable problem is over!

I did the two -oo verses so you can see that the way the poem reads is the most important thing. In the first verse there are eight syllables in the first and third lines while there are only six in the second and fourth. In the second verse I used eight syllables in each line.

In both verses the lines that rhyme have the same number of syllables. Don't waste a lot of time on this now. You have some great rhyming words and a way to keep your lines sounding even by the chin trick. Just take this list of -oo words and have some fun. Now think of something and say it in rhyme.

Have fun and keep smiling!

Here are your good rhyming -oo words

And a few more...