If you have a teenager that is very interested in poetry, you might have to deal with a lot of sub-par rhyming. This can be frustrating for you if your child wants to share a lot of his or her poems with you. However, you can help improve your child's rhyming in a variety of ways. This will help your child be a lot more successful with writing poetry and increase the chances that he or she will continue to write poetry in the future. Here are some tips for helping your child improve his or her rhymes.
1. Practice During the Day
When you are driving your child to soccer practice or taking him or her to school, encourage your child to think of rhymes for everyday objects that you point out. Make a game of it. Choose a word and say something that rhymes with that word. Then, have your child say another word that rhymes. Go back and forth until one of you cannot think of a word that rhymes. Whoever cannot think of a word loses a point. This will turn rhyming into a competition which can help your child be more interested and motivated in the practice.
2. Buy Your Child Books for Poetry
Also be sure that you are providing your child with a decent amount of samples of good rhyming in poetry. This will help your child get exposed to different rhyming schemes and different examples of rhymes that he or she might never have thought of on his or her own. Encourage your child to find a poet that he or she wants to emulate and have him or her read a lot of that poet. Then, have him or her write poems that are supposed to sound as though the poet wrote them. This will also help your child practice his or her rhyming.
3. Make Slant Rhymes a Last Resort
Finally, talk to your child about how slant rhymes are a last resort. Slant rhymes are when a poet uses words that don't quite rhyme but come very close to doing so. Slant rhymes, when overused, can make a poem difficult to read because the tone will be off. Show your child examples of overused slant rhymes. Encourage your child to spend time with rhyming dictionaries on the Internet before he or she resorts to slant rhymes.
For more information, talk to a company that specializes in poetry contests for teenagers.