By engaging with poetry, children strengthen their thinking, while they learn to listen to their little heart. They collect a wealth of knowledge, experience a variety of emotions, cultivate their imagination, take care of their spirit, get to know ideas, values and ideals, shape their morals, encounter advice and examples for their lives, develop their elegance, while at the same time enjoying the music and the rhythm of poetic speech. Unfortunately, however, textbooks lack appropriate poems by inspired poets, while school teaching focuses mainly on superficial analyses and the learning of writing techniques, such as meter recognition, homogeneity, etc. Hermeion, taking into account the children's psyche, has carefully collected from old poetic anthologies that are no longer published and from old school reading books, the most appropriate folk poems and great poems Greek poets (such as Kostis Palamas, Ioannis Polemis, Georgios Drosinis, Zacharias Papantoniou, Georgios Vizyinos and many others), which nowadays are extremely difficult to find.
All these excellent poems were included with increasing difficulty in the textbook of the school. It is a highly innovative and pioneering book full of colors and illustrations that illustrate the poems. Here each poem is accompanied by original activities and playful exercises of an open and closed type, full of humor and inventiveness, which, while causing children to laugh, are interesting and versatile grace, they help them at the same time to understand the poem and to feel it, to learn all the useful knowledge and information contained in it, to see, hear and smell the images with their imagination, the sound and smells of the poem, to reflect on and be inspired by its ideas and teachings, to listen to the rhythm and melody of the poetic word and to recognize the poetic writing techniques, so that, ultimately, they develop the ability to approach each poem they come across. Mainly, they experience conscious and intuitive experiences cultivating their souls. The teaching is also enriched with a variety of images, videos, selected relevant songs or even the poems themselves set to music, so that it becomes not only effective, but also extremely enjoyable and attractive to children.
The exercises of the book do not burden the children with homework, as they are the subject of teaching and their solution is optional. However, the children are entrusted with the memorization and recitation of the poems. Mesimation aims at the cultivation of memory, which is one of the basic conditions of learning. Unfortunately, memorization has been banished from modern school reality in the name of «parroting». Of course, to «parrot» meaningless information without understanding it is futile. However, remembering many and varied useful knowledge, which one understands, is a valuable skill and an advantage that can only be acquired through mental training through memorization. As far as recitation is concerned, children are asked to practice the correct pronunciation of the Greek language, to use their breaths and their speech instruments correctly in order to speak clearly and expressively and finally to become familiar with public discourse, in order to build courage, self-confidence and outspokenness that will accompany them every time they address people either on a personal or social level.
«Poetry has its roots in human breath»
