Looking for some free poetry for your homeschool?
I know of some websites that have free ebooks with beautiful classics that you can use to teach your kids. These include poems and verse suitable for kids ages 4 and up including teens.
These ebooks can be read online or in some cases printed off so that you and your kids can make notes on them. They are in the public domain so they can be used for anything.
Sources of Free Poetry
Here are some sites that have free ebooks of poetry that you can use in your homeschool.
Gutenberg.org
Gutenberg.org has free ebooks you can use for your homeschool. If you click on Book Categories on the left, you’ll see what kinds of bookshelves that they have. My favorite to go to is the Children’s Bookshelf which has a wonderful variety of classics that are perfect for your kids. One of their subcategories is Children’s Verse which has beautiful books of poetry suitable for children. If you are looking for poetry for a greater age range including teens, check out the Poetry Bookshelf. It has everything from Beowulf to The Song of Hiawatha. There’s also one more lesser-known bookshelf you might be interested in called Poetry, A Magazine of Verse. It’s an entire volume of magazines that were published in 1912 and 1913.
Google Books
Google has a separate search engine called Google Books which enables you to find free and paid ebooks and magazines. If you type in, say “children’s poetry”, you’ll get more than 400,000 results. The only problem with this is that some of them you have to pay for and some are free, however, there’s a trick for finding the freebies that I’m going to share with you. Click on Search Tools at the top. In the dropdown menu, click on Any books and change it to Free Google eBooks. Now you’ll see only free poetry books that you can use for your homeschool. You can save these ebooks to your Google account so that you can find them anytime you want.
By the way, did you know that poetry can be used for not only reading practice, but drama as well? Reader’s Theater: Appleseed John is an example of poetry made into a script for drama. It’s a freebie of mine that you might be interested in. It tells the story of Johnny Appleseed in rhyming verse. I think you’ll like it!
Enjoy your free poetry!
Many blessings,
P.S. If you really like poetry in drama, I have two other printable books with scripts you can use. One is Reader’s Theater: Classic Poetry and the other is Reader’s Theater: Christian Poetry. The first uses classic poems by such well-known authors as Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Wordsworth. The second is made up of Christian poems by Chesterton, Blake, Longfellow and more. I highly recommend that you check them out.