Poetry and Riddles for Children: Fostering Creativity

Poetry: An Expression of Beauty

Poetry is the expression of beauty or aesthetic feeling through words, whether in verse or prose. We understand verse as subject to words and cadence or rhythm, while prose is the structure or form that language naturally takes to express concepts, not subject to the same cadence as verse. The rhythmic art of combining words is not the only thing that distinguishes poetry from narrative.

This combination is what we call rhyme, the matching of final syllables in subsequent or alternate verses. There are two types of rhymes:

• Consonant rhyme: When all the letters of the last syllable agree on two or more subsequent lines.
• Assonance rhyme: When only the vowels match.

We can classify poetry into three categories:

1. Epic poetry (or narrative poetry)
2. Lyric poetry - designed for the song of the five-string harp known as the "lyre"
3. Dramatic poetry - intended to be staged

General Characteristics of Poems

1. Almost always about the feelings or experiences of the author or someone else.
2. The time in which the poet lies is almost always the present.
3. Its most common mode of expression is the short verse, abounding in recurrence rates or phonetic, semantic, or syntactic structure.
4. Lyric tends to be shorter and smaller, in order to concentrate its meaning either in verse or prose.

Poetry and Values for Education

Constituent elements of nursery rhymes are lyrical tenderness, metaphor, and rhyme rhythm. Poetry not addressed to children may lack some of these poetic devices, but children's poetry, if it is to be savored by the child, never should. A small child is able to spontaneously create poetry. "A button can be a full moon, a rope on the ground, a snake that crawls." They are much more capable of living poetry.

Classification of Poems for Children

Children's poems belong to two types of poetry: oral tradition and folk poetry, and poetry by a known author, usually released and transmitted by the graphic arts. Folk or popular poetry can be classified into:

1. Rhymes of movement and action (lullabies, rhymes for rolling, etc.)
2. Danceable rhymes (circle songs, rhymes with wit or word games such as jingles, tongue twisters, etc.)
3. Rhymes merely sung (songs, romances)
4. Rhymes of a religious nature (carols and prayers)

The Riddle

More than a definition, the riddle is a description, as it often avoids specifying the essential components of an entity or object, to designate elements or accidental aspects such as its causes, effects, and similar properties. The riddle proceeds by associations of images, words or sounds, homonyms and antonyms, with ample generosity, with reference and paradox. The mystery, coupled with fascinating glimpses of revelation and concealment in flashing turns, stimulates the deciphering of the enigma.

How Riddles Help Your Child

1. Develop their intuition, imagination, and reflection: Deciphering riddles greatly exercises care, especially necessary to distinguish the words of others, to penetrate their inner meaning, and to warn of potential partnerships, which are fulfilled through a more skilled proficiency.
2. Develop the creative capacity of the child: Nothing can be created without something pre-existing. Humans create or invent by the surprising discovery of unprecedented partnerships between existing beings.
3. Get to the discovery of something unknown through the given elements: Though hidden, this is a function of the whole puzzle, whose resolution, like the artistic or technical invention, is also the result of a combination of previously discovered data.

How to Create a Riddle

1. Estrangement: Choose an object, but with the surprise that we produce something for the first time. Separated from its meaning and its usual contents, the object has lost the familiarity that makes us identify it and becomes known as mysterious. For example, an UMBRELLA's protection from the rain, its material, how it is handled.
2. Association and comparison: We have chosen an object property, but do not define it in its entirety. For example, an UMBRELLA's SHAPE, a sort of little roof.
3. Final metaphor: Finally, we present the object from a different angle; thus, it becomes a challenge to the imagination.
4. Rhyme: This is the newly created rhyme, but it does not always have to be indispensable.