Identifying Poems and Rhymes

You are going to learn how to find poems just by looking and listening. Poems have three big clues: rhyming words, a beat called rhythm, and lines that repeat. Once you know these clues, you can tell a poem apart from a story or a fact book right away.

Rhyming words sound alike at the end. Cat and hat rhyme. Sun and fun rhyme. Many poems put a rhyming word at the end of one line and another rhyming word at the end of the next line.

Try this: read a poem out loud and listen to the very last word in each line. If those last words sound alike, you found rhyme, and that tells you it is probably a poem.

Poems have rhythm. Rhythm is like a beat in a song. When you read a poem out loud, the words seem to bounce up and down in a pattern.

You can clap your hands while you read a poem to feel the beat. Stories do not usually have this same kind of beat, so if you can clap along, that is another clue that you are reading a poem.

Many poems say the same line more than once. This is called a repeated line. The repeated line might come at the start of every part of the poem, or it might come back at the end.

Look at the poem below. The first line and the third line are exactly the same. That repeated line is a strong clue that you are reading a poem.

Stories have long sentences that tell about characters doing things. Stories do not always have rhyme, rhythm, or repeated lines.

A poem uses short lines. It often has rhyme, a beat, and lines that repeat. An information book gives facts, like how many legs a spider has, but it does not usually rhyme or repeat lines either. When you check for these three clues, you can tell a poem apart from other kinds of writing.

Poem: A kind of writing with short lines that often rhymes and has a beat.

Rhyme: Words that sound alike at the end, like day and play.

Rhythm: The beat you can clap along to when you read a poem out loud.

Repeated line: A line in a poem that comes back again later in the poem.

Read a poem out loud with a grown-up and circle the two words that rhyme at the end of each line. Clap the beat while you read. Then find a line that comes back again and put a box around it, just like the poem above.

Next, pick a short story and check it for rhyme, rhythm, and repeated lines. Since it probably has none of these three clues, you will know right away that it is not a poem.

Related lessons

• Recognizing Poems