By Jack Prelutsky
Over two hundred very short rhymes, grouped by subject, so you can turn to 'rain' or 'bedtime' and be reading aloud within seconds.
You can actually use this one on a Tuesday morning. Jack Prelutsky pulled more than two hundred short rhymes from about a hundred and twenty poets, some famous, some anonymous and hundreds of years old, and then did the genuinely useful thing and grouped them by subject. Rain sits with rain. Bathtime sits with bathtime. Cats, snow, mud, dinner, going to bed. Most run four to eight lines, so one takes about half a minute out loud. Marc Brown, who draws Arthur, ran colored-pencil pictures and borders across every page, so it reads like a picture book instead of a poetry book. And there's a first-line index in the back, which sounds dull and is exactly why it ends up staying on your desk.
The thing I'd tell another parent is that it reads aloud cold, no practice, and that matters more than it sounds like it should. The rhymes are old, worn smooth by a century of mouths, and the rhythm carries you even when you've never laid eyes on the poem before. You don't trip. Because everything's grouped by subject and indexed by first line, you can find something for a rainy morning or a restless three minutes before lunch without hunting, which is the difference between a book you use and one you keep meaning to. It builds an ear, too: a child with a couple hundred rhymes in their head may have an easier time hearing rhyme and beat everywhere else. Most poetry books for this age give you one poet being clever. This one hands over a whole tradition, and you can dip in for thirty seconds at a time.