Using Songs to Teach Poetry to Children (Part 2, The Process)

In this current series of posts, we have been considering the use of songs to forge a pathway of true appreciation of poetry for our children. The complexities of poetry can prove a bit abstract for a concrete-minded child, but music can be a useful tool to actually demonstrate the subtleties of the art of poetry.

Today we will look at a hymn which fills all the necessary requirements to earn a place on the well-written song shelf. “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” has been sung for almost 150 years, and the poetry itself is so inherently musical that the text has been set to several different melodies and arrangements. The story behind the song touches my heart in light of its message. Let us always remember that songs were written in a time and place, and that context can birth a deep connection to the meaning.

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“O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” was penned by Samuel Trevor Francis. His poem relates God’s enveloping love to that of a swirling, limitless ocean. One evening as Francis walked through London, downcast in spirit, he contemplated throwing himself off a bridge into the river. His faith was being tested, but instead of giving into despair, he anchored his trust in the love of the Lord and lived to write this beautiful hymn that so poetically portrays the words of Ephesians 3:18-19. The tune “Ebenezer,” which pairs so nicely with the oceanic imagery, is the most widely used melody for the hymn. The poem reads very autobiographically for Francis’ experience on the bridge over the current-driven river that day. Instead of being overtaken by the literal waves of this world, he threw himself into the great deep that is the love of God. What a profound analogy!

For brevity’s sake, we will focus on the first stanza only. As you read the words, read them aloud to yourself. Trust me! Poetry is best read aloud just as songs are best sung aloud. You will notice the meter and the rhythm almost immediately.

O the deep, deep love of Jesus! Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free;
Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me.
Underneath me, all around me is the current of Thy love,
Leading onward, leading homeward to Thy glorious rest above.

Do you hear the current? Did the regularity of the stressed syllables catch your attention? The artistry of words feels like this strong, yet benevolent ocean. The most popular setting of this hymn, “Ebenezer,” reinforces this feel of a “rolling” ocean with rises and falls that keep coming like the waves upon the sea. When you sing this hymn tune with your children, you may easily sway like you might if you were on the deck of a ship to feel the beat of the song. The swaying will bring the syllable structure into focus, and in no time, you have shown your children the poetic element of meter. You even get bonus points because you kept within the maritime theme with your movement!

The device of rhyme becomes simply delightful to teach children using a song. Children are eager to spot rhymes, but with a song, you have the added delight of singing the rhymes and finding the rhyme scheme. This hymn has a very basic, yet effective, rhyme scheme (AABB) that is highlighted by each musical phrase. Children can hear the actual rhyme scheme and differentiate it from other similar sounds within each line. I also enjoy introducing assonance with this song because of the multiple long E sounds found within the words, and this specific poem assists you in showing your children the difference between a true rhyme and just the same vowel sound in a pair of words.

The last two elements I want to highlight using this song make the true poetic magic happen. Metaphor and atmosphere are the true standouts in this piece’s artistry. Go back to the waves crashing with the pulse of the song. Now picture this “vast, unmeasured, boundless” ocean that is the love of God. Do you feel the never ending, always flowing love of God surrounding you entirely? What atmosphere is set when you think about a totally encompassing sea of God’s perfect love? When you sing with your children and dive into this song, your children should be able to “see” this metaphor and be taken by the atmosphere. When you discuss these elements with your children, it is a perfect time to ask open-ended questions and give validity to any sincere answer. You are helping them to develop their personal taste and their observation skills when you provide a safe place to discuss their own subjective opinions about the arts. As your children form a personal connection with the song, they will inevitably store this big view of the love of God in their hearts.

Oh! So much more can be said, but I will wait for the last post in this series. I truly hope this has helped breathe new life into your treatment of poetry and maybe even into songs that you sing every day. Be on the lookout for Using Songs to Teach Poetry to Children (Part 3–Leveling Up and Down).

Don’t forget to sing with your children today! Your children will probably not care if you were always dressed to the nines, but they will cherish the memories of singing together daily.

Make Memorization Memorable in Your Children’s Choir

“My children’s choir only meets for 30 minutes once a week. How do I get my choir to memorize the words to all of our songs in time for their performance?”

I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked this question. Memorization can be a tricky task for a children’s choir director, especially when rehearsal time is limited or rushed. We are always told that children’s brains are built for memorization, but sometimes we fail to see this come performance time. The fact is that children do memorize and remember so much information with ease when they are given the chance for consistent repetition over a bit of time. Some of my very best childhood memories involve singing entire songs from old musicals which my sister and I watched again and again over our summer breaks. That constant exposure over time really makes that information stick, but most of us do not have years to prepare for our choirs’ concerts and musicals.

Most directors would jump at the opportunity for more time with their children’s choirs, but the reality is that this busy culture of ours has allotted just enough time to dip our toes into a multitude of different activities, which is great for wide exposure but limits depth in any one activity. Every spring when sports and end of school activities take over, I would find myself in this time crunch weeks before our final spring concert, so I began to start rethinking how I could help my choir memorize more efficiently. I learned two things in the process: We tend to overestimate a child’s ability to memorize stacks of raw information in a short session, but we also underestimate a child’s ability to memorize conceptually from an understanding of connected information.

My first daughter actually gave me the insight to this different approach. She was about 3 years old and had been singing her ABC song with the wonderful nonsense word “eleminopy” right in the middle of the alphabet. She also had been learning what the letters look like and their proper order from a place mat I had gotten her. It was the first real scholastic eureka moment I witnessed in one of my children, and I was so proud! She had taken her little finger to the place mat to point to the letters as she sang, and she realized “eleminopy” was actually 5 letters and not a funny word stuck in the middle of all the other letters. From that point on, she knew the context and sang the correct letters from then on. As a result, I had a eureka moment of my own: Understanding and context play a huge role in a child’s memorization. My sweet daughter locked that new bit of information away and has never looked back. What had taken her a couple of years to learn was quickly corrected, assimilated, and stored for use for the rest of her life. Of course, consistent repetition will always be a way to really cement details, but the understanding of the language and message help smooth the process and provide the glue to stick all the details together in a meaningful and lasting way.

I decided to give this new way of tackling memorization a go with my children’s choir that spring, and I was so pleased with the outcome. I began spending less time drilling the words of the songs and more time discussing the meaning of the lyrics and the way they fit together. It is much easier to remember a complete thought than a string of words. A complete thought works with your mind to make associations and connections that pull the words together in a logical order. Most young children do not do this initially on their own, which is why you can hear them singing hilariously cute mispronounced or made up words, such as “eleminopy,” as though they belong in the song. Once my daughter sang her ABCs with a visual guide, she put the letters in context and gained understanding of what she was singing. If we take a minute or two every rehearsal to explain and review the lyrics as complete thoughts and why they are important to sing, our children will memorize more efficiently over the course of the precious few weeks of rehearsal time because they will connect the words as parts of the whole instead of isolated chunks.

I recently had the privilege of directing a children’s choir for a Good Friday service. They were to sing four verses of “Man of Sorrows,” and we had only three rehearsals to commit the entire song to memory. They were singing with live accompaniment, and most of the children were 8 years old or younger. We spent almost the entire first rehearsal just talking about the meaning of each verse before speaking through the lyrics with the correct emphases and inflections. Then we sang the words in the same way that we spoke them. The second rehearsal was much of the same but as a review. By the third rehearsal, those who could read were not referencing their sheet music anymore, and the little ones were keeping up with them very well. We had the luxury of spending that third rehearsal refining the harmony part and enjoying the music rather than drilling words. When they sang for the service, they were singing with conviction from an understanding of the lyrics. Have you ever watched a child singing from a worshipful heart, proclaiming the truths they have stored away? I am sure you have witnessed this from time to time, and it is a truly beautiful sight. In fact, I would assert that most of us children’s choir directors signed up for the job with this very goal in mind.

The process for memorization is pretty simple. Explain and discuss your chosen song with your choir. I like to start with the general idea of the whole song before discussing the meaning of the individual verses and chorus. Ask questions about the meaning. The more you can engage your choir in this process, the more they will interact with the lyrics themselves. Once they understand the idea of the song, you can have them repeat after you with your designated inflections. I would not jump directly to singing quite yet because spoken lyrics will add the next layer of connection to help children see the full thought before you add the melodic component. After they have put the right emphases in the spoken lyrics, the next step is to pair it with the melody. Now you can use that old, faithful tool of consistent repetition, but I am fairly certain the groundwork you have already laid will make that repetition more fruitful and even more enjoyable. Children love repeating something they enjoy, so if you help them to enjoy your chosen song through the understanding of it, they will want to repeat it as many times as your energy allows.

So are you ready to give this a go? You might already be using a similar process in your choir, and I would love to hear about it. Please share any extra helpful comments below. Together we all make up a wealth of knowledge and experience, and we can all learn from each other.

Working with a children’s choir is one of the most rewarding activities I have ever experienced. The invitation you extend to the children to sing with you creates a long-term connection with them, and you are pouring into them in a way that will affect them for the rest of their lives. Thank you for all you do to support these children in this way. As adults, these children will be grateful for all of your effort, and they will always remember that you took the time to sing with them.

Using Songs to Teach Poetry to Children (Part 1)

Poetry can be hard. Just hard. But poetry is also the flavor to our language. The creative license to morph, change, manipulate, and even make a joke of our words gives the poet power to communicate beyond the written words on the page. It is this space between the lines of poetry where the true artistry lies.

When we teach poetry to children, we might stare it down like a deer caught in the headlights of a quickly approaching vehicle. We can certainly present it as a battery of literary devices, such as alliteration, metaphor, consonance, etc., to check off our list, or we can simply require the memorization and subsequent recitation of the “great” poems. They will catch an idea of poetry and be able to recognize its shadow, but really getting to know poetry will draw attention to the message or impression that is covertly placed between the words. The beauty of poetry really lies in the relationship between the concrete and abstract, and our children are still working to create a category in their world for the abstract. So…teaching poetry to children can be very hard.

Enter the well-written song! If I were writing a comic book right now, this would be the entrance of the super hero. A song can be your best and first tool to help your children move away from dissecting poetry like a science project and start to notice the many elements which make poetry the art of language.

To begin, let’s take a moment to define a well-written song. All songs are not created equally! The first quality of a well-written song is that it must be crafted with intentional meter and sound devices. Secondly, a well-written song will have a melody which supports and gives deeper meaning to the subject of the song. This connection between music and meaning provides the bridge for children to begin understanding the unspoken communication of poetry. Finally, a well-written song will evoke emotion of some sort because the message has stretched past the intellect to reach the heart. Think of your favorite song, and you will most likely feel an emotional rise from within. You probably have great appreciation for your favorite song, so how wonderful would it be for our children to have the same appreciation for poetry? How much wider their world would be!

A well-written song provides hand holds for children to concretely “see” the abstract qualities of poetry. Additionally, most children naturally love music, and it can lighten the task ahead. Through the song, children can hear the rise and fall and the predictable nature of the meter because the melody calls attention to these features. The melody is also the avenue for discussion about climax and resolution or discord. The key and arrangement of the song will open the door to mood and atmosphere, and the goosebumps you experience from a truly touching song provide the element of excitement to ignite a love of artistic language.

So are you ready to give it a go? In the next two posts, I will walk through a song to illustrate the process and give practical steps to implement this process for different age ranges. You might be surprised, though, to find even your young children hanging with your older children.

As always, I encourage you to sing with your children daily. They will not remember if you always have your laundry folded and put away, but they will remember singing together and often with you!

3 Reasons to Car Sing

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Does this sound familiar? We are running about 3 minutes behind, and my kids and I are jumping into the car to get to wherever we are going that day. There might have been a few tears over wardrobe and the decision of who is riding shotgun that day, but if I don’t hit any red lights, we will get to our destination on time. Let’s go, kids! I turn on my podcast, my oldest daughter opens her book, and my seven-year-old daughter stares out the window, occasionally interacting with her baby brother in his little car seat. We are all within an arm’s reach of each other, but we are not together. It was frantic getting out the door, and we are in need of a calming, a centering, a gathering of all the separate pieces of our day.

Feeling a bit regretful that my words had sounded much like a bark, I turn off my podcast, ask my oldest to close her book, and get my seven-year-old’s incredible ear for music tuned to a song we all know: “Holy, Holy, Holy.” I simply start singing, and my daughters join me, one on the melody and the other on the harmony. No instructions were given. We all knew what to do. And in those few moments, we were united and centered, and the hurried morning melted away into a fresh beginning of our day. When we finished singing, we all smiled in relief, and we started a conversation about how beautiful the morning was and all that we had to do that day.

So here are 3 basic reasons we love to car sing in our family:

1.) Joining each other in song in the car gently unifies our family as we get ready to head out for the day. We might each be going to different places and have different challenges weighing on us, but singing together on the way reminds us that we are all in this together and that we are all of the same mind.

2.) Singing a carefully selected song redeems your time spent in traveling. Do you ever feel that you waste time sitting in the car? I know I do! Meditating with my children on songs about Jesus and then talking about the lyrics makes the best use of that time.

3.) Singing together in the car is just plain fun! Sometimes we sing thoughtful songs, but most of the time our car singing is a bit more energetic and maybe even silly as we work out different harmonies or sing in a wild opera style. The point is not to make the car a place of solemnity; the point is to make that time memorable, profitable, and enjoyable, and some days the best way to reach that goal is through laughing out the lyrics.

This togetherness in song has been cultivated over the years, and one of the self-identifying marks of our family is that we are a singing family. The car has become one of our favorite places to sing because we are all kind of bound within a small space with limited distractions. We are making even short trips in the car lasting memories as well as meaningful instruction time in a very unforced, organic way. Instead of remembering how we were usually running a few minutes late to everything, I hope my children will remember that we made the most of our time together by singing worthwhile songs in the car.

Singing with Your Children

What if I told you that you could make lasting memories with your child in just two to three minutes a day with a simple habit? What if these connections would survive the rocky road of the teenage years? What if these memories would even perpetuate through the “finding myself” stage and bolster the fortitude of your child’s adult years? Would you want to put this habit into practice? You bet you would!

This habit with almost magical properties is simply singing together with your children on a daily basis. We all know music is a fantastic mnemonic device. (Just try to say the alphabet without singing it!) The songs we sing build a nearly unmovable home within us, and they have a wonderful way of flooding our minds with memories and ideas and even comfort. We interact with songs during times of celebration as well as during times of sorrow or distress, and we call them up like old friends–friends we would like to introduce to our children. When we carefully curate a repertoire of songs to teach our children, we are giving our children a gift that truly comes from our own hearts, and we begin forging strong connections with our children. Even after a long, hard day of parenting, the act of singing together can soften and repair and give hope before those little eyelids close to rest for the night.

Singing with your children is a way to communicate security and to pass along your faith to them. As a Christian, I love singing “Jesus Loves Me” with my children every night before they go to bed because it allows their minds to linger on one of the most important truths they will ever hear in life–that Jesus loves them now and always. If I spent just a few minutes reviewing the words to many of the songs of our faith, we would see that these songs cover many crucial doctrinal beliefs, and it would be a tragic missed opportunity to neglect singing them with my children.

So are you ready to start? Chances are, you have already been singing here and there with your children their entire lives (read: “Old MacDonald” and “The Wheels on the Bus”). My invitation to you is to be very selective and intentional about the songs you sing and to make singing a daily habit. Music is fun and most children enjoy it, but even reluctant singers can be encouraged to participate.

And if you’re a children’s choir director, I’ll have some posts just for you! Thank you for all you do to pour into the children in your choir. You have such a privileged position which allows you to impact each of those children in a powerful way!

Your children will not remember if you never go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink, but they will remember the songs that you sing with them every day. Let’s start singing!