April is National Poetry Month, and it’s a good time for mother-daughter book clubs to consider selecting poetry for a meeting.

There are many ways you can enhance a book club poetry meeting to extend to the whole family. My book club chose to read poetry for a month a few years ago, and everyone in the family got into the act. First, we all headed to our local library to pick out books of poetry that we wanted to read (in addition to our assigned book). My husband and I went for some of the classic poets that we read when we were younger, because we wanted to remind ourselves of some of our past favorites. We chose Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and others. We also added a few poets we weren’t familiar with, like Langston Hughes.

Our daughters both chose books with poetry that would make them laugh. They liked Jack Prelutsky’s A Pizza the Size of the Sun, and It’s Raining Pigs and Noodles. We took turns reading our favorites out loud over the dinner table each night.

We also tried our hand at writing poetry. I can’t say that anything profound came out of our efforts, but it was a great creative endeavor, and we wrote poems we could be proud of. When it came time for our group meeting, we had a great time reading some of our favorite poems out loud and sharing some of the work we had written as well.

Check out some of these titles of poetry that kids may enjoy if you plan to have a poetry meeting of your own:

•    Kenn Nesbitt—Revenge of the Lunch Ladies, My Hippo Has Hiccups: And Other Poems I Totally Made Up, and several other collections of poetry.
•    Jack Prelutsky—A Pizza the Size of the Sun and It’s Raining Pigs and Noodles, plus more titles of poetry.
•    Robert Louis Stevenson—A Child’s Garden of Verses.
•    Emily Dickinson—The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.