5 fabulous features of children’s poetry

In honor of National Poetry Month, I invite you to open up the world of poetry to your children by exploring a favorite anthology and listening for features of children’s poetry—those elements that make poetry come to life!

Today we’re going to take a peek at onomatopoeia, repetition of sounds, repetition of words, rhyme, and figurative language.

Add some poetry into your homeschool days. Your kids will fall in love!

The Joy of Children’s Poetry

I practically cut my teeth on Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Our bookshelves at home were well-stocked with volumes of poetry, both classical and modern. I knew Longfellow, Dickinson, and Chaucer, but somehow, except for that dear Stevenson book (and a hefty dose of Dr. Seuss), I never really knew the joy of children’s poetry and all its wonderful features.

The Discovery!

A children’s literature class in college changed all that, exposing me to this delightful genre through the works of Christina Rossetti, Walter de la Mare, Rachel Field, and others.

Years later, I stumbled across The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (now dog-eared and tattered from loving use). Compiled by Jack Prelutsky, this anthology is filled with classic and contemporary poems children love.

Many nights, the girls would snuggle in bed as I introduced them to Myra Livingston Cohn, Eve Merriam, and other poets who wove tiny tapestries from vibrant words and figurative language. They loved the whimsical, fanciful, and often-humorous poems we would read together at bedtime!

How to Introduce Poetry to Children

Children’s poems excite the senses and imagination with literary devices, vivid vocabulary, and the pure joy of words. A good poem usually includes several poetic devices. As you read aloud to your kids, help them listen for these fabulous features.

1. Listen for Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates a sound. Invite your kids to listen for words like buzz, gulp, swish, oink, clink, and bang. “Fishes’ Evening Song” by Dahlov Ipcar is filled with examples of onomatopoeia, making the poem especially fun to read aloud.

Water falls
Drop by drop,
Plip plop, 
Drip drop,
Plink plunk,
Splash splish…

2. Listen for Repeated Sounds

Alliteration results when words that appear close together share the same beginning sound. Your kids will enjoy listening for examples of alliteration, such as Christmas cake for a clatter of kids or Brighter than a blossom / Thinner than a thread.

A form of alliteration known as consonance focuses on the same consonant sound in the middle or end of a word, as in Jasmine’s bees went crazy / When the mower cut the flower.

“Sing Me a Song” by N. M. Bodecker is not only loaded with examples of alliteration and consonance, it’s just pure fun to recite!

Sing me a song
of teapots and trumpets:
Trumpots and teapets
And tippets and taps,
trippers and trappers
and jelly bean wrappers
and pigs in pajamas 
with zippers and snaps…

3. Listen for Repeated Words

Repetition in poetry is pleasant to the ear, making it a common occurrence in children’s poems and one of poetry’s most fun features. Not only can poems contain repeated sounds, they also can contain repeated words. Here’s a fun example:

Whether the weather be fine
Or whether the weather be not
Whether the weather be cold
Or whether the weather be hot …

Along with alliteration and consonance, Karla Kuskin uses word repetition in her poem “Spring.”

I'm shouting
I'm singing
I'm swinging through trees
I'm winging sky-high
With the buzzing black bees. 
I'm the sun
I'm the moon
I'm the dew on the rose.
I'm a rabbit
Whose habit
Is twitching his nose…

4. Listen for Rhyme

Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, but many poems do. Train your kids’ ears to listen for lines that end in the same sound.

Couplets feature two rhyming lines in a row, as in “Eletelephony” by Laura E. Richards. This rhyming pattern is called AABB.

Once there was an 
elephant
,
Who tried to use the 
telephant
---
No! No! I mean an 
elephone

Who tried to use the 
telephone
...

Sometimes, every other line in a poem will rhyme, as in James Stephens’s “The White Window.” This rhyming pattern is called ABAB.

The Moon comes every night to 
peep

Through the window where I 
lie:
But I pretend to be 
asleep
;
And watch the Moon go slowly 
by...

In other poems, only the second and fourth lines might rhyme, as in “The Morns Are Meeker Than They Were” by Emily Dickinson. This rhyming pattern is called ABCB.

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting 
brown
,
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of 
town
...

5. Listen for Figurative Language

Poetry leaves no room for dull, boring words. Through a poet’s use of descriptive language, your children will be able to picture a poem’s colors, sounds, and textures. Similes, metaphors, and personification are examples of figurative language. Figurative language contains images that compare one thing to something else.

Similes compare two things that are basically different but have strong similarities. Similes compare by saying “this is like that.” They use LIKE or AS to make the comparison. May Swenson uses a simile in “The Woods at Night.”

The binocular owl 
fastened to a limb 
like a lantern
...

Metaphors also compare two unlike things, but without the words LIKE or AS. Metaphors simply say “this is that.” In “All Kinds of Time,” Harry Behn writes metaphorically about time.

Seconds 
are bugs
 
minutes 
are children
 
hours 
are people
 
days 
are postmen
...

And in this example of personification, James Stephens’s poem “Check” makes Night seem like a mysterious woman.

The Night was creeping on the ground!
She crept, and did not make a sound
Until she reached the tree: And then
She covered it, and stole again.
Along the grass beside the wall!
—I heard the rustling of her shawl
As she threw blackness everywhere
Along the sky, the ground, the air...

Children’s poetry is a delight to the senses. I hope you jump right in—a wonderful world of words awaits!

Poetry doesn’t have to be boring! Your kids will love Let’s Write Imagery Poems! This digital resource lets them have fun with words as they learn about the poetic devices and figures of speech that make poems so much fun to read!

Also, WriteShop Primary and WriteShop Junior homeschool curriculum feature at least one engaging poetry lesson in each level. Your children will have fun with poetry!

When creating illustrations for your children’s picture book, there are essential tips you must keep in mind to get it ready for design.

Are you an author creating a children’s picture book? If so, then you’re aware that – unlike other genres – your story is more than just text. It’s also told in illustration. The hint is in the genre title, right? Children’s picture books and books told primarily by pictures.

With that in mind, have you decided how your text and your illustrations are going to work together?

At Old Mate Media, we help indie authors get their books completed and published royalty free. Sometimes we help authors right from their first edit, through their illustrations, into design, publishing and marketing.  But quite frequently, we work with authors that already have their art and need our help with design first, and then the rest of the journey beyond that.

And frequently these authors haven’t understood the relationship between text and image, and how to best prepare both for design. This can often mean finished images simply won’t work and are either hamstrung or need to be started again. Which is a horrible outcome for all.

In this article, I will walk you through what you need to keep in mind BEFORE you start doing your images. And remember, you can always book in a free chat if you need guidance and help getting started on your children’s picture book journey.

We've also created a video explaining the tips mentioned in this guide. To read the full transcript of the video, click here.

Where will your story text go?

There are three general approaches you can take with the way text is positioned in your book. The method you decide will impact the way you create and submit your images.

1. The adjacent page method:

The easiest method is to have an image on one side of the spread, and the text on the other. This way your image can be all it can be, without being corrupted by the text. The above image shows an example of this approach from a book we did for Terri Wise called The Magical Cupcake Blanket.

Just remember, when you print your book, the cost of production will be impacted not just by the size of your page, but also the number of pages. Therefore, this approach isn’t ideal for long stories. If you have 30 images and 30 stanzas, for example, this would equate to a 60 pages, which is relatively expensive to print.

A slight spin-off of this idea is to have your image go across the spread, but have all the detail on one side, and just background or a splash of colour on the side with the text.

Just remember that in design, we will most likely flip spreads. If the first spread is image on the left page and text on the right. On the next spread it will be text on the left, image on the right. We do this so you don’t have text behind the image, as with cheaper printers (like Amazon) the text can show through.

2. The beside method

Slightly more complicated is having the image and text on the same page, but separate from each other. For example, you may have a portrait book, with a square or rectangular image at the top of the page leaving white space at the bottom for text. This is slightly more complicated in that the dimensions of your image are not set by the book itself, but by your estimate of how much space you will need for the text below (or beside in landscape).

This is why it’s important to get a developmental edit before you begin your images. Otherwise, you may end up needing to increase your story on a certain page (or reduce it) and find out you need different image dimensions after all. Whatever image size you fall on with this method, just stay consistent with the dimensions of your images.

The image above is of a book we made for Tori Cormack called Bringi, and shows text below and above an image.

3. The on-image method

The most complicated approach is to have the text on the image itself. This requires a lot of forward planning. How big will your text be? What font will you use? What happens if you want to add in an extra line – will the text still fit on your image? Is the background bland enough that the text will stand out?

This approach is beautiful and keeps page counts down, but absolutely make sure your book is fully edited and complete before you start as mentioned above. You’ll have very little wiggle room for change at design.

You would be surprised how many times we end up having to put a white box, usually transparent, over the image of a story to show-off the text, because not enough space has been left, or the background is too complicated, for the text to be readable. You can see this approach in the above image from a book we created for Andrea Sanchez called A Realm of Light.

How font choice impacts children’s book design

Fonts can vary greatly in how much space they require to display the same sentence. Or how big you need them to display.

Remember that first and foremost, the goal of text is to be readable. And with children’s picture books, that text is often being consumed by early readers or be elderly grandparents. Fancy and funky fonts – at least for the whole of the story – are best avoided in this regard. You can always just highlight certain words, dialogue or statements for effect in a funky font and leave the rest more traditional.

However, if your approach and style demands a font that’s a bit different, then it may require bigger than normal size and spacing to stay legible. Or it simply may take up more space by the nature of its design.

As such, if you don’t think about that in advance, and then do your art using methods two or three above for your layout, you can get into trouble. It may fit perfectly in Times New Roman, but then be unreadable in that cool kids scribble font you’re after.

Frequently we have authors come to us during the design phase and say, “hey, I want a funkier font,” but it’s too late. Well, unless you start cutting chunks of story out or putting white boxes over the image to make it work. Which isn’t ideal because, remember, this is a children’s picture book.

Never draw your story text into an image

This is vitally important. Yes, it can look awesome if you (or your artist) is talented enough to make your story text look like it is part of the art. Fancy fairy tale style lettering is very romantic, for example. But functionally, it can be very restrictive on your design.

I’m talking about the story proper here. Elements in the image itself, such as shop names or street signs or name tags – things of that nature – are fine. But the story itself should be layered into your book by the designer for many reasons. Namely…

1. Images may need to be increased or decreased in size when laid out into your children’s book design. For example, we may need to account for bleed in an image. Or shift an image slightly to keep a key element away from the bind of the book. If the text is in the image, when you change the image size, you also change the text size. This creates an inconsistent reading experience from page to page and makes your book look cheap.
2. What happens if you want to edit your story later? Or if reviewers complain about a story element not working or that that the font’s too small? Or too hard to read? Maybe there is an error you missed? Sometimes we even change wording slightly so a book connects better with a sequel. If the text is in the art, you can’t make any fixes or changes to the editorial without redoing the art. That can be costly or impossible if your artist has disappeared off the internet.
3. Your book has solid spectacularly and you decide you want a Spanish version, or a German version, or maybe Japanese or Arabic. If your text is in the art, you must redo all the art – especially as the translated text won’t organically fit into the spot you’ve left for it. A designer can’t do it for you, which would be much cheaper.

I could go on, but you get the point, right? In the image above you can see an example from a book we are remaking for Ira Walzer called Mozzarella Cheese Please. He wants to change elements of the text and create a digital version, and we’ve had to cut out the text from the images and redo some of the art to make it work.

What about text in digital ebooks

It’s true that dealing with text in eBooks – a fantastic and underutilised medium – is a different proposition. As you can do pop-up text with any font you like – at least in ePub 3 - the space your image takes up isn’t necessarily a relevant concern. Check out the image below for an example of pop-up text in our book Christmas Chimney Challenge from the The Wild Imagination of Willy Nilly series.

However, the fact that Kindle – the biggest storefront for digital books – is an archaic format focused on novels over children’s books, means that in most cases you’re better off keeping to the principals of print.

Indeed, the cheapest and most efficient way to convert your print book to digital is to stick with a similar layout to print. However, depending what size and shape book you’ve gone for, and how much text you have, we may make some changes to ensure your text is readable on a screen potentially as small as an old phone.

We also often work with people who have print books published long ago that want a digital version, so don’t let the fact you’ve got old books put you off. Get in touch and chances are we can still help you get an old print book published and live as an eBook, too.