YMB #126: Delighting in the Beauty of Words: A Conversation with Megan Andrews

This is your Morning basket where we help you bring truth, goodness, and beauty to your homeschool day. Hey everyone, and welcome to episode 126 of the Your Morning Basket podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host, and I’m so happy that you are joining me here today when today’s episode is so much fun. We have the delightful Megan Andrews here from Center for Lit, and we’re gonna be talking all about how to delight in words.
And one of the ways to do that is by learning more about literary devices. Now, don’t get upset or worried. We’re not gonna make this difficult or hard. Actually, we have a few ideas. Megan has a few ideas on how you can do this in a fun and delightful way. And we’re also gonna be talking about Megan’s book as well.

Speaking of something delightful, we would like to invite you to come on over to the website and download our free Christmas gift to you. Every year we try to make Christmas just a little more merry, bright and easy for homeschool moms with one of our free Christmas Morning Time resources. And this year we have our newly revised and refreshed Advent Morning Time plans available for free download.
So you can come grab those. We’ve got three weeks worth of book suggestions, music appreciation, picture study poetry, and so much more to make your holiday Morning Time delightful. Come find those pambarnhill.com/Christmas. And now on with the podcast
Megan Andrews is the principal of the Center for Lit Online Academy. In addition to her administrative work, she has the privilege of teaching literature and writing classes to elementary and junior high kids, even outside the classroom. She is an enthusiast of children’s literature and has always dreamed of writing and illustrating her own children’s picture books. Her book, Hop Skip, and A Rhyme Literary Devices for Young Writers is her first of hopefully many thomes. Megan, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me. I’m so delighted to be here.
Oh, it’s gonna be so much fun. So start off by telling everyone who doesn’t know you, a little bit about yourself.
Sure. Well, as Pam said, I am a teacher and a principal, so I am in the world of education, but more than that, I am just a lover of children’s picture books. I always have been. And I was inspired by them at my mom’s kitchen table, and we actually had the idea for the book that I have now written together. So I very much plugged into my family and I think of children’s picture books in association with warm time with my mom. So that’s kinda where the inspiration came from.
Yeah, you were homeschooled yourself, right?
I was, yep. I was homeschooled K through 12. Yep. Until I went off to college in Michigan.
Yeah. And so Megan is actually from a very, what I consider a famous homeschool family. Her dad is Adam Andrews from the Center for Lit and goodness, I think the first time I heard him speak was about 12 years ago.
Oh wow. Yeah.
Yeah. So just super excited about that. Like my now senior was probably a kindergartner or first grader, and so
Oh my goodness, that’s such an honor.
Yeah, it, it was, it was such an honor to get to hear him speak and I remember what he spoke about, which was Paul Revere’s Ride. So, so much fun. Cuz that’s one of those lovely rolicking kind of poetry picture books that I think is like the ones that you grow up with at your mom’s kitchen table.
Absolutely.
Well, where could you just, why words, Why not math or why not science or why not? Something like that? Where did the passion for words and language come from other than the picture books?
Oh man, what a great question. Well, for me, not math, because I’m so bad at it, I really had trouble as a lot of homeschool kids do. I think putting it together, putting the pieces together for math and my association with math growing up was tears. There were lots of tears both from me and from my mother. And so math was never gonna be my strong suit.
But the flip side of that was that my mother’s strong suit was poetry and English. And she really emphasized for me that poems are like word pictures, that they’re like creating a tangible thing out of an abstract. So when you think of an idea, like love for example, you can’t hold on to that thing, but a poem can make that thing come alive and you can almost hold it in your hand because of the visual imagery and description that a poem can offer.
So I was really inspired by that growing up, and I think all words have that kind of imagery quality to them. They make the abstract idea tangible. And I was fascinated.
I love that. I love that so much. Did you guys memorize a lot of poetry when you were growing up?
Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s a, it’s a good tool for just teaching you composure up in front of the classroom.
And I was one of six kids, so you know, the class was composed entirely of my siblings, some of whom were paying attention and some of whom were not. But it still was a poetry was a good opportunity for diction and elocution and poise up in front of the classroom. But more than that, the poems themselves had such depth to them.
They were almost like shiny and not all my siblings took to it. But I loved it. I loved the word quality and the feeling of the words in my mouth and the stories that they told everything about it. It was love at first sight.
I love that they were shiny. That’s so awesome. Yeah, you know, I think that when I think about poetry, you know, sometimes you get, I was a literature major in college and you know, you would get these professors that really wanted to plum the depths of what the poet meant and what they were talking about. And I think that’s all fine and good. But to me, the flip side, the fun side of the poem was like exactly which word did they choose and what was the rhythm of it, and how did it fit into the overall structure of the poem? And, you know, just how did it, how did it feel? And like you said, how did it feel in your mind?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sound quality is the first part of poetry that that I think a kid falls in love with because maybe they don’t know what all of the words mean, but they sound cool and it should catch their ear and then make them curious about that second stage that you’re talking about diving deep into the meaning of the poem beneath the word choices.
I love that. That’s so true. I’ve never really thought about it that way. But even if the meaning is not as approachable for kids, that quality of the sound can be a place where they can enter into the poem itself and kinda get that first level even, even if right now they’re too young to get the second level, you know, are really absolutely.
It makes me think of like an A.A. Milne poem, the depth of which isn’t really in the significance of it, at least it is for the grownups, but for the kids, they like a Winnie the Pooh kind of poem because of the sound of the words.
So for a kid, the reason that they love an A.A. Milne poem is first and foremost because of the way that it sounds and the way that it kind of runs along. Like I’m thinking of the poem hoppity, or no, I think it’s called “Happiness” by A.A. Milne. And it just goes, “Christopher Robin goes hoppity, hoppity, hoppity, hoppity, hop. Whenever they asked him politely to stop it, he says he can’t possibly stop. If he stopped hopping, he couldn’t go anywhere. Poor little Christopher couldn’t go anywhere. That’s why he always goes hoppity, hoppity, hoppity hoppity hop.”
I have a kid like that.
Do you really?
Yeah. Yeah. But it’s so true. Like, you hear the words they do, the words themselves hop along.
They absolutely do. And so for the parent, there’s significance because I’m sure they all think like you did, I have a kid like that. But for the kid, it’s the sound of the hoppity, the word hoppity that makes them want to skip around the classroom. Delightful.
Yeah. I love it. I love it. Well, and that makes me think of a, we just got to, in our poetry memorization program, we just got to the poem, Jabberwocky, and I read it to my kids as an introduction, and one of them looked at me and said, half of those words don’t even make sense. And I’m like, they don’t have to. They’re just really fun words.
Absolutely nonsense Poetry is a whole genre of literature.Louis Carroll is part of a larger group, and they were fascinated by just that thing, the, the creation of words that don’t mean anything, but they’re fascinating for their sound quality and for how close they are to something that could mean something. They suggest a meaning, but they require the imagination of the kiddo to finish the poem, which I think is so cool.
Yeah, that is, it’s almost like, okay, this is gonna seem a strange analogy, but it’s almost like a wordless picture book.
Absolutely. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. So the kid is filling in and know, it seems weird to say like a poem with nonsense words is like a wordless picture book, but the child is filling in the story. So it’s a suggestion that requires the participation of the audience.
Yeah. So what are some things we can do to help our kids? Maybe they’re a little bit resistant, so what can we do to help them delight in the beauty of words? Like, like you and I are kind of geeking out. How do we get kids to do that too?
Sure. Well, I don’t know. I think one of the first things that I do as a teacher, if I find that some of my students are less prone to enjoying wordplay is to connect the words with pictures. To give them a picture book that’s got a poem with it so that maybe they have an artistic side of themselves and the picture grabs their attention first.
That I think is the reason that my first introduction to poetry was in a picture book, because the words themselves have the power to go without the pictures. The pictures are an aid, but they’re not necessary to the art of poetry. But I do think they can help those kids who are more reticent to enjoying the words on their own.
The other thing that that I do with my kids is require that they read the poem out loud to me. So maybe I show them first, here’s how it sounds, here’s how fun it is to sit and listen, but then require that they read it back, whether they are, you know, just starting out with reading or whether they’re in junior high, the, the act of participating and like we’ve talked about feeling the words on your tongue, I think it woos, it woos the kids to the art form, and I tell them to go slowly and have them do it more than once.
Mm. Okay. Okay. So having them read out loud. And then what about literary devices? And I know that we’re starting to enter this, these waters that some moms feel kind of uncomfortable with.
Sure.
Like, I don’t know what the literary devices are. How am I supposed to teach these to my kids? And why, Why should I even bother if they’re not gonna really spend a, a lifetime sitting around reading poetry? Sure. Let’s talk about that.
Yeah. Well, I have an analogy that I like to use when talking about literary devices and it’s, I don’t know if it’s helpful or not, but I think of them like paint brushes. They’re like paints and paint brushes in the hands of an author. They’re not necessary for the clarity of an author’s work, but they’re, they’re decorative and powerful. So in his hands, they can illustrate an idea that he’s already made clear in his work.
And if you know the name of a literary device, or better yet, if you can define it and you understand what to watch for, then the simplest phrase can really come alive and have more significance for you and your kids. And there are only a handful that come up a lot in, in basic works of literature. So it can be pretty easy to memorize a few and then feel empowered as you read along and recognize they’re like familiar friends.
Like for example, onamonapia, even knowing that word makes you feel really smart. It’s like a party trick. If you can spell it extra perks for you, it’s got all kinda unnecessary vowels in it. But in basic form onamonapia is just a sound word. It’s a word that sounds like what it means, like pop or snap or crackle, right? They’re words that even as your mouth pronounces them, they sound like what they are. And that’s it. That’s one whole literary device, you know what it means. And now you’ll see it everywhere. And I think that that’s a powerful thing that is worthy in its own right. But I would say to the moms who are overwhelmed, it’s like gravy on top of understanding a good book.
It’s not necessary to being a good reader. It’s just one of the things to enjoy in a good work of literature.
Yeah. You know, we’ve alluded to poetry, like we talked about it a number of times here. Yeah. But literary devices in the hands of a good author are used throughout all kinds of books. And once you are familiar with them and aware of them, then you start to become aware of how carefully an author has gone about choosing the words that they use in their work. You know, whether that be a chapter book or, you know, a picture book or a poem, they really do use that all over the place.
Absolutely. They are, they are tools for description. So wherever a description comes in handy, these literary devices will be present. They’re one of the things that make imagery in any kind of writing.
Yeah. And it’s funny you should say like, you know, you kind of like, you start seeing it everywhere and you’re almost like a little word detective. My kids love, love, love when they see one of the literary devices that we’ve talked about in a book, and then sometimes they remember the name. Sometimes they don’t remember the name, but, Oh mom, isn’t that that thing, you know, we were talking about. It’s that thing.
It’s that thing.
But then sometimes they, they do remember the name and they own it. And you can tell that there’s, you know, they’re feeling a little bit proud of themselves that they actually remembered.
Yeah. So tell us about another literary device we talked about on, on appeal. What’s another one?
Another one. Another one of the most common is a metaphor. And a metaphor is a comparison of two things that are not like each other. For example, my heart and a stone. Right? Hopefully those things have nothing in common on the average day, but by comparison we can draw out some similarities between them. You can know some things about the way that I’m feeling if I compare my heart to a stone. Now, there are technically two ways of comparing those two unlike things. We can use a comparison word like, like or as, which would dumb down the comparison a little bit. It wouldn’t be quite as dramatic to say,
My heart is like a stone today. It would be clear for the audience, I’m feeling heavyhearted, Right? Or maybe my heart is cold like a stone. We’re thinking of associations between those two things. But with the like word, with the comparison word, we’re using a similie and it’s slightly less dramatic with a metaphor. We take out the comparison word and we act like dramatic Victorian ladies and we say, My heart is a stone. Right? Thereby making that comparison even more outspoken. So you’ll see those two kinds of comparisons all throughout literature because it’s a way that the author can really efficiently make a feeling into a tangible, a tangible comparison.
And yeah. And the, one of the wonderful things about your kids getting used to those kinds of comparisons, it’s then they start making them themselves. You know, and I think it happens in their heads when you’re not even like, you’re not even part of the process at all. They’re just doing it inside and they’re drawing those comparisons for themselves. And that just kind of digs deeper into, you know, what makes us thinking people is because we’re doing those analogies.
And I think poetry is such a great tool for teaching that kind of relational thinking between things.
I love that. I love the way that you put it, that they’re not always aware that they’re doing it or we can’t see that they’re doing it. But it is one of the ways that our minds work just as human beings. And I think the art of poetry and literary devices more broadly is to help you watch yourself think where that’s concerned to realize, Oh, I’m always making that kind of association. Let’s do it out loud on purpose.
Oh, I love that. Okay, so speaking of doing things out loud on purpose, I think one of the fears that moms have, well, moms have a lot of fears about poetry and words. And one of them is, this was no fun for me when I was in school because somebody would make me pick apart the poem and just suck all the enjoyment out of it. So I don’t wanna do that with my kids. And so we kind of waffled between just reading poems and feeling like, I’m not sure anybody’s getting anything out of this. And you know, this fear that we’re gonna pick it apart and suck the life and enjoyment out of it. So how can we kind of strike a balance and maintain an enthusiasm while teaching these kinds of things to our kids?
What a great question. Well, instinctively, I don’t think you study every poem. I think that sometimes you just read a poem just for fun, to appreciate the sound quality, and you give it to your kid at the beginning of an English class. You read it just once and say, “Wasn’t that nice” and you move on. So, give yourself the freedom to not always make it a lecture about poetry, but I would also encourage thinking about these literary devices as just appreciating an art form, appreciating the paints that a painter is using. We don’t look at a painter’s palette and say, I think it destroys the work of art to see all of those little blobs of paint separate from one another glistening and distinct before they’ve been made into a painting.
We don’t, we don’t say that that is not a worthy thing to look at. It’s actually kind of inspiring, at least to me, to look at a painter’s palette before it’s been put up on the canvas. Literary devices are the same way. So you can see them as distinct little blobs on the canvas and imagine the potential that they’d have and then notice them when you do.
But don’t take apart every poem this way. That’s not what they’re for. They’re for deeper appreciation rather than, I don’t know, a checklist to examine every poem that way.
Yeah. Okay. So you would maybe introduce the concept of a literary device and then give a few examples of it. And maybe try your hand at writing some of your own? How would you go about this?
Absolutely. So the way that I’ve done it in my classes is perhaps, introduce the literary device of the day. Give them a silly example of my own, I’ve written a few. And then maybe show them one in a classic, a classic poem. So maybe illustrate for them, here’s on a kid level. It’s just for fun to help you understand here it is in a Percy Bysshe Shelley poem. Can you see how even the greats use this? And you can recognize that all of a sudden and now maybe try your own hand. That right there would be a whole lesson that’s a whole day spent on poetry and it’s concise and it’s helpful. Maybe you refer back to it a couple weeks in a row, but I wouldn’t maybe give that lecture every single day.
Right. Maybe just throw in a literary device lecture every once in a while just to sort of brighten up your own understanding as a class.
Yeah. And you know, one of the cool things about these most common literary devices, and some of which that you were talking about earlier is once you’ve done that and introduced it, if you’re sitting there doing your poetry memorization the next day and you’re going over four or five poems, there’s a very good chance that there is going to be an example in one of those poems. And you know, in that case I would just stop and say, Oh, did you hear that?
I do recognize it. Yeah.
And then see what they could come up with.
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of times, like you mentioned earlier, that’s happening in their minds anyway. And if you just pause for a moment, sometimes your student comes out and says, Did you hear that that was alliteration? Did you see how three words started with the same vowel? I recognize that from yesterday. And that can be the most rewarding moment as a teacher to hear them jump in and say, Yesterday’s lesson landed, let’s notice it today.
Yeah. We’ve, we’ve made this connection.
We made it.
What about working on poetry? You know, we talk a lot about Morning Time and getting the entire family together. How do you do it when you’ve got little kids, big kids, and all kinds of kids in between?
Mm. Well, I usually do more than one poem if I’ve got a mixed class with some, some littles and some, some older kids. At Center for Lit we really emphasize that kids don’t grow out of enjoying kids’ books. And I think the same goes for kids’ poetry. A Winnie the Pooh A.A. Milne poem goes over well, no matter how old your audience, so I would always start or include in Morning Time at some point a poem for the littles that they really can grasp.
Or maybe it’s their turn to read it out loud. It’s their turn to memorize and perform. When I was coming along, my mom would have us do Morning Time together and we would recite our poems together. And some of the poems are really short, and the littles got to be on stage for those. And some of the poems were longer, The littles had to listen because that sound quality they can appreciate as well.
And maybe they’re gonna gather some things from watching their older siblings do things that are over their heads. But a, a broad selection of poetry and keeping everybody together, both for the older kids to remember and appreciate the depth that there is in a little kid poem. And for the little kids to, to realize and maybe grasp for things that are a tiny bit over their heads.
I don’t think that’s, that’s bad for anyone in that scenario, but to assign a poem that’s appropriate for each grade level and then have everybody appreciate together.
Oh, I love that. Yeah. And that’s so important because I think sometimes when we think about doing poetry with younger children, kids who are preschool, kindergarten, first or second grade. We’re like, Oh, you know, that’s gonna be really hard. But there’s some delightful poems out there that are very young kid appropriate.
There really are. Absolutely. And their capacity to, to memorize longer ones, as long as they are aimed at a little kid, as long as they do have those, those shiny words in them, and maybe the topic is something a kid appreciates, like “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” or “Winken, Blinken and Nod.” They’re imaginative, their, the mind, the mental landscape is created for a kid to enjoy and their ability to memorize things like that is astounding to me.
I was teaching a first grader at one point, and she memorized all of “Winken, Blinken and Nod” in about two weeks. It was so incredible. Their minds are like sponges.
They memorized so much faster than we do
So much faster. Yeah. I had to have the book in front of me, but she had it. She had it down.
Yeah. So much so. Yeah. Okay. So how can we translate some of the stuff that we’re learning in our literature class, some of this fun that we’re having with words in these literary devices into using them in our writing?
Mm. Well, I think that it starts with the definitions with understanding what the literary devices are. And, and for my students, I have them create a word bank. They actually have in their notebooks, they have the literary devices that they’ve memorized so far, each with an example underneath from a poem that I’ve given them so that they can see it in context, see it being used. And once they have that word bank in front of them, sometimes in their writing assignments, I will require that they use one and I’ll let them choose. But I’ll say, Okay, in this week’s paragraph, you know, that’s about fill in the blank, whatever book we’re writing about, I want you to use one instance of personification. And then I’m not gonna tell them what it is again. They need to go back to their book and review their definition and then try to give an inanimate object, the qualities of a personality to, to kind of enliven something that isn’t already alive in their writing.
So a word bank like that can be really helpful and then keying back to it in your assignments is a good way to make them practice.
I love that. I love that. Like, you know, you’ve introduced all of them, you’ve given them the definitions. They have a resource that they’ve created that they can look back on. Yeah.
And then you simply, you’re not requiring they use five. You’re just saying in this particular paragraph, can you use this one?
Right.
And I bet when they use them spontaneously, you point that out as well.
Absolutely. Oh yes.
Always encourage their attempts to use them. But to the point of not telling them to use five in a row, they can clog up your writing. If you really get literary device happy, it’s like having too many adjectives or adverbs in a sentence. It’s like it’s, you can’t see the subject in the verb anymore. It gets too, there’s too much imagery. It gets a little suffocating. So I try to, to moderate that with my students by telling them just a few, just a few in a paragraph. Because they’re like, they’re illustrations, they’re like salt and pepper. If your paragraph is a soup, they’re salt and pepper. You don’t wanna overdo it.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yep. Can’t be too salty. So let’s talk about your book Hop, Skip and a Rhyme Literary Devices for Young Writers. How can moms use this as a resource in their homeschool?
Mm. Well, I hope, My hope is that this book would have a couple different uses. First of all, it’s meant to be a picture book. It’s meant to just be enjoyed with a lap sitter or with a group of kids held up library style so that they can appreciate the picture, the illustration that’s there, and then just listen for the sound quality.
I hope that they’re funny. My intention was that they would make you chuckle and make little kids giggle as they tried to say them out loud. That’s the first purpose of this book, is just to purely enjoy it like a library book. The second one though is of course for homeschool moms and teachers to use as that resource. The first thing that they do after they define a literary device is they need an example.
And these poems are supposed to be that example. So you’ve explained in your own words, Here’s what onamonapia. You read them this poem and then you talk about it together and you say, Did you see all of the onamonapia going on in this poem? Let’s find them all. And it can be kind of a complete lesson all on its own without you, the teacher having to go and research what poem can I find that would be an obvious example of this literary device?
I love that. Like you’ve just saved a lot of homeschool moms a lot of time because not only do they have the examples, but also they have the list of literary devices that, these are really good ones to focus on and teach your kids.
So you’ve to So that you know there.
Yeah, I hope so. There are a lot of literary devices and I’ve chosen for this book, I’ve just chosen the most common ones. So there are many more where this came from, but this, this forms a basic understanding of the most common. So if you feel like you’ve got your feet under you with these ones and this book, then you’re, you’re in pretty good stead. Your kids are ready to appreciate most works of literature with an understanding of these tools.
Yeah. And possibly even use some of them in their own writing as well.
So I hope so. Yes. Well, where can we find the book and where can we find more about you? Yeah, absolutely. So I work for a company called Center for Lit, and my book is available on the Center for Lit website. If you go to the centerforlit.squarespace.com/books, that’s where you’ll find my book. I think it’s also on Amazon as well, if you wanna search that way. But it’s slightly more expensive on Amazon, just so that you know. So that’s where to find my resource.
Also on the Center for Lit website, we’ve got all kinds of things. We’ve got teaching resources. Our method of teaching is based on asking questions and listening for good answers from our students. And so we have a program that teaches you the homeschool mom how to do that, how to lead a good discussion. It’s called Teaching the Classics. And that’s kind of our flagship program. But we also offer online classes so that if you are overwhelmed and you would rather outsource all of this English teaching, we teach those classes for you. So that’s the online academy that you can also find on the Center for Lit website. The last thing that I do for Center for Lit is I participate in podcasts like this one. I have two podcasts that I’m a part of. One, it’s called Biblio Files and that’s the whole Center for Lit Crew talking about big ideas.
And the other is called How to Eat An Elephant. And that’s one where we read gigantic books. Like we just did War and Peace.
Oh wow.
In five chapter increments. And talk you through the whole thing. It took us two whole years. It was really overwhelming.
I bet you’re ready to move on to something else now, aren’t you?
Oh yes. So ready. Our next one is Le Mis. We just kicked that off this week, so we’re gonna go slightly fast just through that one. We’re hoping it only takes us a year, but it’s a really fun time.
Oh wow. So much fun. Yeah, Biblio files is one of my favorites. So much fun to listen to.
I, I like to, I feel like I’m just getting to eavesdrop on the conversation and so that one, just hear smart people talk about books, so it’s fun.
Or fight about books depending on our day.
Well, you know, I wasn’t gonna say anything, but you’re all in the same family so it’s fine.
It’s definitely a window into the Andrews family dynamic.
Oh, I love it. I love it. Well, we are gonna put a link to Hop, Skip and Rhyme in the show notes for this episode of the podcast, as well as all of the other resources that Megan was talking about today. So thank you so much for joining us to talk about literary devices and how they don’t have to be quite so scary.
And there you have it. Now, if you would like links to any of the books and resources that Megan and I chatted about on today’s episode of the podcast, you can find them on the show notes pambarnhill.com/ymb126. And I will be back again in a couple of weeks with a very special Christmas episode. So don’t forget to go to pambarnhill.com/christmas and get your free Christmas goody those Christmas advent plans for this year. And I will be back. We’ll be talking all about how you can use Christmas traditions as the heart of your homeschool this holiday season. It’s always so much fun to do that. I love doing it with my kids. So come back and join us for that one in a couple of weeks.
Until then, keep seeking truth, goodness, and beauty in your homeschool day.