Tell a kid it's time to read a poem and you might get a groan. Tell that same kid "hey batter batter, swing ___ ___!" and watch them finish the line without missing a beat. That's the secret hiding in plain sight: kids are surrounded by poetry every day. They just know it as something else — a song stuck in their head, a jingle they can't shake, a cheer they've shouted from the dugout a hundred times.

Rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and clever wordplay are the building blocks of poetry, and they show up constantly outside the poetry unit. The trick to getting kids excited about poems isn't necessarily starting with a page in an anthology — it's showing them the poems they're already carrying around in their heads.

What actually makes something a "hidden poem"

Before hunting for examples, it helps to know what to listen for. A hidden poem usually has one or more of these:

Rhyme — words that echo each other at the ends of lines. Rhythm and meter — a beat you can clap or stomp to. Repetition — a line or phrase that returns, building momentum (this is where refrains and choruses come from). Sound play — alliteration, wordplay, or even spelled-out words used for rhythm and suspense.

Once kids know these four ingredients, they can start spotting poetry everywhere — and that's the real goal. Not memorizing definitions, but training an ear.

Start with the songs they already sing

Pop songs are poems with a backing track. Pick a favorite song and print the lyrics without the music. Ask: where does it rhyme? Where does the same line come back around? Where does the rhythm speed up or slow down? Kids who'd never sit still for a Shel Silverstein poem will happily pick apart a chorus they've sung a thousand times — and once they see the rhyme scheme on the page, they've done real poetry analysis without realizing it.

Then move to the jingles that won't leave their head

Commercial jingles and ad slogans are some of the tightest, most deliberately crafted little poems out there — someone got paid to make sure a phrase would stick. "Have it your way." "I'm lovin' it." A cereal box mascot's little rhyme. Ask kids to bring in a jingle or slogan they can't forget and figure out why it works. Usually the answer is the same short list: rhyme, rhythm, repetition. Ads are a great bridge because they're short, funny, and completely unintimidating — perfect for kids who think poems have to be long or serious.

And then, the dugout: baseball cheers as poetry

This is where things get really fun — and where our new favorite mentor text comes in: Hey, Batter Batter {Baseball Chants and Cheers} by young author and baseball player Owen Lee, available from Xist Publishing.

Baseball dugouts are basically oral poetry factories. Cheers get passed from player to player, season to season, refined over and over until only the catchiest version survives — which is exactly how folk poetry has always worked. Flip through the book and the poetic devices are everywhere:

Rhyme carries the momentum in cheers like "Battle, battle, rip it to Seattle. If you get lucky, rip to Kentucky. If you can, rip to Japan." Repetition builds the chant in "Ball four, base hit! Ball four, base hit! Ball four, base hit!" Spelled-out words create suspense and rhythm in cheers like "We need a single, just a little single. S-I-N-G-L-E!" And plain old silliness and internal rhyme show up in favorites like "We want a pitcher, not a belly itcher!" and "Hey pitcher, look at me, I'm a monkey in a tree! Ooo ah! Ooo ah!"

Read a few of these out loud with kids and clap along, and they'll feel the meter in their bodies before they ever hear the word "meter." Then ask the poetry questions: What rhymes? What repeats? Why does it feel good to shout? Kids who've stood in a dugout yelling "hits on three!" already have an intuitive grasp of rhythm and repetition — this just gives them the vocabulary to talk about it.

Try it as a writing activity, not just a reading one

Once kids can identify rhyme, rhythm, and repetition in a cheer, jingle, or song, the natural next step is writing their own. A few easy on-ramps:

Write a cheer for a favorite team or player, using a cheer from the book as a template and just swapping in new names and details. Turn a jingle into a cheer, or a cheer into a jingle — same tools, new context. Write a "hidden poem" scavenger hunt list and have kids collect one example each of a song hook, an ad slogan, and a cheer or chant, then present their favorite to the group and explain what makes it work.

This kind of low-stakes, high-familiarity writing is a great warm-up before tackling more traditional poetic forms — by the time kids get to haiku or free verse, they'll already know rhyme and rhythm aren't scary; they're just baseball.

About the book

Hey, Batter Batter {Baseball Chants and Cheers} Written by Owen Lee

A joyful collection of the chants, cheers, and dugout wisdom that make baseball season what it is — from classic call-and-response cheers to sportsmanship shout-outs to a few good-natured jabs at the ump. It's a natural fit for baseball families, team read-alouds before the season starts, or a poetry unit looking for an example kids will recognize instantly.

Shop Hey, Batter Batter →

About the author

Owen Lee has played baseball since he could hold a bat in his hands. Written when he was a 12u player in Houston, Texas, Owen has always loved cheering on his teammates from the field — and he brought that same dugout energy to the page. A left-handed pitcher who also plays first base, Owen loves reading funny books about real-life situations, hanging out with his friends, and, of course, playing baseball. Hey, Batter Batter is his first book, and it's about as close as you can get to hearing poetry straight from the source — a kid who's actually been out there shouting it.

Poetry doesn't have to start on a page kids don't recognize. It can start at the plate, on the radio, or in a jingle from a commercial they've seen a hundred times. Once they know how to listen for it, they'll never run out of poems to find.

For a lot of kids, Spanish is the language of home — the one spoken at the dinner table, at abuela's house, in the car on the way to school. For other kids, it's a language they're just discovering, one they're excited to make their own. Either way, learning to read in Spanish takes a different set of tools than learning to read in English, and most beginning readers on the shelf weren't built with that difference in mind. Little Lectores, Xist Publishing's new 32-book series of Spanish decodable readers, was.

Written in authentic Spanish by Katrina Streza and Ariana Vargas and illustrated by Brenda Ponnay, Little Lectores follows Paco, his dog Coco, and his best friend and neighbor Zita through the everyday moments of a kid's life — getting dressed, going to the store, playing at the park, helping in the kitchen — while systematically building the exact skills a new reader needs to sound out Spanish on their own.

Built around how Spanish actually works

English phonics programs lean on rules with a lot of exceptions. Spanish doesn't work that way. Spanish is a syllabic language, built by pairing consonants with vowels into syllables that are pronounced the same way every time. The syllable "co," for example, sounds identical whether a child is reading Paco, Coco, or come — no guessing required.

Little Lectores takes full advantage of that consistency. The series starts with simple one-to-one letter sounds and repetitive CV (consonant-vowel) syllables in Book 1, then layers on complexity gradually: two consecutive consonants and vowel syllable breaks by Book 9, diphthongs by Book 16, three consecutive consonants by Book 22, and full paragraphs for fluency by Book 27. High-frequency sight words are introduced alongside the decodable text at every stage, so kids are building real reading skills — not just memorizing sounds — from the very first page.

Every title is mapped to Common Core Reading Standards for Foundational Skills, from kindergarten phonemic awareness through first-grade fluency, so the series slots neatly into a classroom scope and sequence or a home reading routine. For the full breakdown — book by book, phoneme by phoneme, sight word by sight word — download the Little Lectores Scope & Sequence Guide →.

A reading buddy for every kind of learner

What makes Little Lectores especially useful is how many different readers it's built to serve.

For kids who already speak Spanish at home, these books offer something that's genuinely hard to find: decodable readers written in authentic Spanish, not translated from English. Co-author Ariana Vargas, who grew up in Oaxaca, Mexico, made a point of choosing simple, natural sentence structures that hold up across Latin American and European Spanish dialects, so the language feels right no matter where a family's Spanish comes from.

For kids acquiring Spanish as a new language — in a dual-language classroom, an immersion program, or simply a household that wants to raise bilingual readers — the same systematic, syllable-by-syllable approach that supports native speakers also gives new learners a gentle, confidence-building on-ramp. Because each book pegs its Spanish high-frequency words to the 100 most common English sight words (and pairs with the companion Little Readers series in English), teachers and parents can build fluency and comprehension in both languages side by side.

That flexibility is exactly why Little Lectores works equally well for Spanish-speaking students learning to read in their native language, for Spanish immersion classrooms, and for ELL and bilingual coordinators looking for material that respects where their students are starting from.

A tool parents and teachers can actually use

Reading instruction works best when the adults in the room understand the "why" behind it, not just the "what." That's the idea behind the Little Lectores Phonemic Awareness Chart — a simple, printable reference of the CV syllable blends used throughout the series (pa, ta, ga, me, te, mi, ni, co, so, and on through diphthong blends like bue, que, and cue). Parents and teachers can use it to chant syllables with new readers, play matching games, or simply preview the sounds a child is about to meet in their next book. Get the Phonemic Awareness Chart →

The people behind Paco, Coco, and Zita

Little Lectores comes from a team that has spent years thinking about how kids actually learn to read. Katrina Streza, MA, developed the series' scope and sequence and 100-word sight word list after years working with elementary students and, more recently, teaching high school English and AP Psychology — including building curriculum to address pandemic-era learning loss. Ariana Vargas, who studied Spanish and bilingual education at UC Irvine and now works as a bilingual educator and community coordinator, brought the authentic voice and cultural grounding that make the stories feel real. Illustrator Brenda Ponnay, whose work has been read more than 10 million times on Epic and featured on Good Morning America, gives Paco, Coco, and Zita the warmth and humor that make kids want to turn the page.

Whether Spanish is the language your reader has spoken since day one or one they're just starting to explore, Little Lectores meets them exactly where they are — one syllable, one sight word, and one Paco-and-Coco adventure at a time.

Shop the Little Lectores Series →

Between new shoes, sharpened pencils, and a backpack that somehow still smells brand new, back-to-school season brings a mix of excitement and nerves for kids — and honestly, for the grown-ups dropping them off, too. These six Xist Publishing picture books cover the whole morning, from the chaos of getting dressed to the wobbly first steps through the classroom door to the friendships (and jokes) that make school feel like home. Here's our back-to-school lineup.