Rhyming pattern in Bigger poetry

[Gwenny]

"What rhyming pattern do you notice at the end of the couplets?"- the guide asks

What is the answer she is looking for? Is there some proper term for it, or is it just something like "the last word of the couplet rhymes with the last word of the next couplet"?

[my3sons]

This gets more in depth in the guides after Bigger Hearts (in R & S English, and in the guides), but in Bigger Hearts, we just found the rhyming words and noticed if they were in a row, every other line, etc. You can label the pattern a, b, a, b (if they rhyme every other line), or a, a, b, b (if the first two lines rhyme, and then the last two lines rhyme), etc., but dc will do a lot with this later. HTH!

In Christ,
Julie

[netpea]

We have been going through it and calling out "a b a b" or "a a b b" for each poem. It just sort of clicked with my dd to do that.

[Gwenny]

Great! Thanks you two, that does help. I totally blanked on the a b a b thing.
Glad to know that more is coming later as well.
I love HOD!

[lissiejo]

I'm an English teacher in background, so I wanted to chime in a little bit I'm actually just finishing up a poetry unit with a group of middle school homeschoolers I teach once a week right now.

In older grades we call rhyming patterns, rhyme scheme. It does use the pattern of letters just as the other ladies mentioned. The technical way of following this is assigning a letter, starting with a, to each line of the poem. Once you reach a line that rhymes with a previous one you assign it the same letter. When I'm teaching my students about rhyme scheme we also look at how the rhyming patterns repeat and when they deviate from the pattern.

[Carrie]

I just wanted to chime in and agree with the ladies' wise advice and to let you know that we do teach the rhyming patterns/scheme right within the lessons in our Bigger Heart's guide in exactly the same way that lissiejo mentioned. We teach this concept again in later guides (and of course very deeply through Rod and Staff English in its upper levels taking it much further). So, you'll get plenty of practice and guidance in teaching this skill as you go.

Blessings,
Carrie