Does a poem for a child have to rhyme exactly, or is close enough good enough?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nClose enough is an adult standard. A grown reader hears a half-rhyme as a deliberate choice; a child hears it as a mistake, because he has already worked out where the line is going and is waiting for the word. Give him the word. Plain rhymes \u2014 day and play, cake and make \u2014 are not a failure of imagination at this age, they are the point, and the pleasure is in getting there a beat before you do. What genuinely will not survive is a missed beat. Read every line out loud and count the stresses on your fingers; if one line carries four and the next five, a child stops listening mid-line and could not tell you why. Fix the rhythm first and let the rhyme be as obvious as it likes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The words he actually cares about \u2014 dinosaur, goalie, hockey \u2014 will not rhyme with anything. What do you do with them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nMove the awkward word off the end of the line. Nothing has to rhyme except the last word of a rhyming line, so a dinosaur sits perfectly comfortably in the middle of a couplet and causes no trouble at all. If you want it at the end, rhyme on the sound rather than the spelling, or split the phrase so a small easy word lands last: he built it out of blocks all week, and stacked them to the sky. The other move is to write around the thing instead of naming it \u2014 the fort, the ramp, the shot he practised until it was dark. He will recognize it instantly and the line will still scan. Forcing a rhyme onto a hard word is the fastest way to a line nobody can say out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He learned last year’s verse by heart and recited it for a month. Does that change what you write?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt changes what you can afford to put in it. A poem a child memorizes stops being a card and becomes something he performs \u2014 at the table, down the phone to his grandparents, at anybody who comes to the door. So write nothing you would mind hearing shouted across a yard: no teasing about a habit he is trying to drop, no nudge about school, nothing that only works if you know the backstory. Build it to be repeatable instead. Regular lines, a rhyme he can feel coming, and one line at the end worth saying twice. End-stopped lines help more than anything else here, because a sentence that runs across a line break falls apart the moment he says it from memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He is eleven and rhyme has started to sound babyish to him. Is verse still the right thing to give him?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nVerse is fine; the sing-song is what he has outgrown. Two changes carry a poem into that age. Shorten it and dry it out \u2014 four lines making one plain observation, no exclamation marks and no pet names, reads as a remark between equals rather than as something written down at him. And drop the bouncing meter for something closer to how you actually talk, landing on an ordinary sentence: we’re mostly on your side, or we’ve noticed, not a word. The second change is where it goes. Hand it over rather than reading it out, because at that age the audience is the problem, not the poem. He will read it twice on his own and say nothing about it, and that is what success looks like here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The poem is longer than the space inside the card. Where do you actually put it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nDo not shrink your handwriting, and do not run it onto the back of the card where the last two lines end up sideways in a corner. Write it on a separate sheet and fold that into the card. A child unfolds it, which is half the pleasure, and a folded sheet survives being carried around, pinned up and taken to school in a way that a card standing on a shelf does not. Copy it out by hand rather than printing it, because the uneven line is part of what makes it his rather than something bought. And if it is going into a gift bag with no card at all, tape it to the box so it gets read before the paper comes off. After that nobody is reading anything for an hour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A rhyme is the one birthday message a child will sit still for. He will not read four warm sentences about how much you love him, but he will listen to eight lines with a beat in them, and if the beat holds he will ask for it twice and then say it back to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":586,"featured_media":6755,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3167],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6754","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/586"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6759,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6754\/revisions\/6759"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6754"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=6754"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=6754"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montreal-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=6754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}