Wonderful winter poems for kids: How to teach young children about the seasons

Teaching  children about the changing seasons, and how seasons differ around the world, can be an important element of early childhood development, and should be included in curriculums and lesson plans.  The cold days of winter are an ideal time for children to learn about seasonal topics such as winter holidays and their cultural variety, calendars, clocks and daylight saving time, weather, animal behavior throughout the seasons, winter sports, recreation and seasonal activities, appropriate dress and winter clothing, and even about the scientific aspects of temperature, freezing and melting points. 

Children have individual learning styles and books, crafts, worksheets, hands-on-projects and videos catering to these unique styles are all wonderful methods to educate children about the winter season.  Parents, teachers, librarians, and other child care professionals who truly want to bring the winter season to life, may also want to select a variety of winter poems for kids.  Poetry is a unique, delightful, entertaining way to help children relate to the seasonal changes occurring around them.  Reading poetry can also be a great exercise for boosting vocabulary. 

Short poems are a particularly effective way to teach key concepts to children who may be too young to follow the story lines of longer books.  Short winter poems for kids, especially poems associated with colorful pictures or illustrations will be most appropriate for younger children. 

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Parents and educators will be well served to visit their local library for recommendations on winter poems for kids.  For those who wish to purchase books, poetry about the seasons can be a very meaningful children?s gift, ideal for birthdays and holidays.  Subscriptions to book-of-the month clubs are another great gift idea for parents, grandparents, and educators who aspire to keep children excited and passionate about reading poetry. 

Winter poems for kids can also be found online at wonderful, educational resources such as Poetry4Kids.  The website storyit.com contains a link to an expansive directory of classical children?s poetry.  Another innovative, new, online resource is the National Poetry Archive which features audio recordings of famous poets reading their work aloud.

Winter poems for kids are plentiful, and it takes just a bit of research to find wonderful poems to coordinate with lesson and curriculum plans.  The poem Jack Frost, featured below, is just one example of an imaginative poem that children will surely be able to relate to when they awake on winter mornings to find frost crystals lacing the windows.  Poems, such as this one by Gabriel Setoun, may be read over and over again, and will become cherished memories that help to build a child?s literary heritage.   

Jack Frost 
by Gabriel Setoun

The door was shut, as doors should be,
Before you went to bed last night;
Yet Jack Frost has got in, you see,
And left your window silver white.

He must have waited till you slept;
And not a single word he spoke,
But pencilled o’er the panes and crept
Away again before you woke.

And now you cannot see the hills
Nor fields that stretch beyond the lane;
But there are fairer things than these
His fingers traced on every pane.

Rocks and castles towering high;
Hills and dales, and streams and fields;
And knights in armor riding by,
With nodding plumes and shining shields.

And here are little boats, and there
Big ships with sails spread to the breeze;
And yonder, palm trees waving fair
On islands set in silver seas,

And butterflies with gauzy wings;
And herds of cows and flocks of sheep;
And fruit and flowers and all the things
You see when you are sound asleep.

For, creeping softly underneath
The door when all the lights are out,
Jack Frost takes every breath you breathe,
And knows the things you think about.

He paints them on the window-pane
In fairy lines with frozen steam;
And when you wake you see again
The lovely things you saw in dream.