Category: poetry

Goodnight Football
by Michael Dahl (Author) and Christina E. Forshay (Illustrator)

Booktalk: A celebration of football, friendship, and family from the opening kick off to the final whistle with rhyming text and a gentle ending for the youngest fans.

Snippet:
It’s the end of the week,
it’s the best of all sights–
beneath the night sky
lies a field of bright lights!

Watch the book trailer.

Six Traits Mini Lesson

Trait: Word Choice This picture book story is told in rhyme and one of the key elements in a rhyming story is word choice. Like prose, poetry is written in paragraphs. A poetry paragraph is called a stanza. The poetry stanza on the first page of the story is four lines long.

It’s the end of the week,
it’s the best of all sights–
beneath the night sky
lies a field of bright lights!

Notice the use of end rhyme in this stanza. The word at the end of the second line:

it’s the best of all sights–

rhymes with the word at the end of the fourth line:

lies a field of bright lights!

The words at the end of the second and fourth lines rhyme perfectly!

The website Literary Devices defines perfect rhyme this way:

“A perfect rhyme is a case in which two words rhyme in such a way that their final stressed vowel and all following sounds are identical e.g. sight and light, right and might, rose and dose etc.”

When the words rhyme perfectly they are a delight to read aloud. When the words are close but not quite the same, something doesn’t sound quite right. Finding just the right word is essential for writing in rhyme. As Mark Twain once said:

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

This week’s Poetry Friday Round-up is hosted by Today’s Little Ditty.

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