Do you make your kids learn poems by heart?
To tell you the truth, me - not.
I don't like to MAKE my son doing something, because it will cause his bad mood. Even if he does it because I forced him, will he do it with love and passion? No, only irrigation and anger.
I don't need such learned poems.
I proposed several times to give him different poems, but I saw he had no interest to them, thus no wish to learn them by heart. And I didn't push him.
From the other hand, he knows by heart many songs he likes! Songs are poems as well;) He likes to sing them in our car;))
And some days ago a miracle happened!
He read a super fine old Soviet poem about 2 boys. One of them was an optimist, and the other one - a pessimist, and the poem shows their attitude to different situations, and the results they get. A very necessary poem for life, isn't it? Much more necessary than all the rest ones, I guess!
And you know what? he liked these guys so much, that he studied a great part of this poem by heart for 1 evening! Just read it some times, and the poem was so great that without any efforts he remembered it and told it to anybody he met!;)
So he likes poems, he just need to find HIS onesm, which he really likes with all his heart.
Another example - we started our way to Russian classical literature with kids fairytales written by a genius Pushkin. He had a perfect language, and his poems were learned by my boy very fast as well!
That's the power of really GREAT literature masterpieces.
One more example, that we don't need to force our kids to anything, they will find their way, we just need to be patient and help them in this task.