Simon Mills (Sir Rhymesalot) is the Storyteller in Residence at McGraw Hill Education. His innovative rhyming verse storytelling is reminiscent of Dr. Seuss but with vocabulary building insight.

Rhyming poetry is a great hook to engage readers in reading, writing, and content across the curriculum. Use Literacy’s rhyming poems—told through compelling stories by author Sir Rhymesalot (Simon E. Mills)—to launch into an exploration of rhyme and poetry with your students. Poems often become favorite reads in the classroom, so you may wish to use the same story repeatedly over the year, delving into different aspects each time.

Sir Rhymesalot’s Proprietary Rhyming System (From McGraw Hill Classroom Curriculum)

Sir Rhymesalot has color coded the text of many of his poems for easier reading and comprehension. This system was designed to help readers identify both rhythm and rhyme and make the experience more intuitive.

• Finding the Rhythm: The main text color, often green, indicates where the beat of the rhythm starts—where to emphasize the first accented syllable. (If there are unaccented syllables preceding the first accented syllable, they are in another color, such as black or white.)

• Finding the Rhyme: Other colors at the end of lines, often orange and purple, identify rhyming words. There may be additional rhyming words within lines, or internal rhymes, which are not color coded. Challenge students to find them.

Example: An excerpt from The Great Catsbe

Enjoy the color-coded Sir Rhymesalot series. It is unique.