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Poems for Fun

These are brief self-contained lessons that you can use to introduce a poem to your class. Have fun with them.

Book Reviews

Hear what I think about various Poetry Books and learn if they would be right for use in your class.

Feb 25

A concrete poem-- GIRAFFE--by J. Patrick Lewis



Introduction:

As a class make a list of characteristics of a giraffe. Encourage the children to describe a giraffe’s color and size, the shape of its head, neck and legs. Ask about the parts of the face and give hints to help the class remember that giraffes have tails. Then before reading the poem, define stilts and tree-tall. Try to use a document camera while reading the poem aloud, so that the words and letters are magnified enough for everyone to see how the words and letters relate to each other.
If not available, copy the poem out onto a large piece of paper.

Giraffe
By J. Patrick Lewis

T
r
e
e- tall
giraffe
u
p

t
o

h
i
s

n
e
c
k
in brown and yellow
patchwork quilts, turns t
and hobbles away a
on wooden i
s s s s l
t t t t
i i i i
l l l l
t t t t
s s s s
This poem cannot be seen clearly when typed into this blog, so please look at the picture of the page to see the beauty and cleverness of this poem.

From: Lewis, J. Patrick. 1998. DOODLEDANDIES: POEMS THAT TAKE SHAPE. Illustrated by Lisa Desimini. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers. ISBN 0-689-81075-X

Extension
Ask everyone about the characteristics of an elephant. What are its legs like? Is there something like an elephant’s ears? Does an elephant’s color remind them of something?
Let the class sketch elephants using just pencils. Then instead of coloring the pictures, they should try to fill the spaces with words that tell about the elephant.

Also show the children "Giraffe" by Maureen W. Armour which is found in
Janeczko, Paul B. ed. 2001. A POKE IN THE I. Illustrated by Chris Raschka. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press. ISBN 0-7636-0661-8
Read More 0 comments | Posted by Nancy edit post
Feb 25

OUT OF THE DUST- by Karen Hesse- A free verse novel



Hesse, Karen. 1997. OUT OF THE DUST. New York: Scholastic. First edition. ISBN 0-590-36080-9

OUT OF THE DUST tells one girl’s story of a poverty-stricken life on an Oklahoma farm through the 1920’s and 30’s. Told in free verse the language is cut down to essentials just as Billie Jo’s life was. The book will grab the reader from the first two stanzas where fourteen-year-old, Billie Jo, the book’s narrator and protagonist, describes her own birth.
Beginning: August 1920

As summer wheat came ripe,
so did I,
born at home, on the kitchen floor.
Ma crouched,
barefoot, bare bottomed over the swept boards,
because that’s where Daddy said it’d be best.

I came too fast for the doctor,
bawling as soon as Daddy wiped his hand around
inside my mouth.
To hear Ma tell it,
I hollered myself red the day I was born.
Red’s the color I’ve stayed ever since.

Billie Jo’s journal goes on to discuss the normal concerns of young teenagers, but all the experiences are colored by the dustbowl experience. For example, when her best friend moves away, she describes her memories, but also her envy that Livie is escaping:

Now Livie’s gone west,
out of the dust,
on her way to California,
where the wind takes a rest sometimes.
And I’m wondering what kind of friend I am,
wanting my feet on that road to another place,
instead of Livies’s.

January 1934

The white space in the poem encourages the reader to pause and think about each phrase. What does it mean to live in dust? What does California represent to poor Oklahoma farmers? How would it be to live with constant dust-filled wind? What does friendship mean to the girls?
We also learn about Billie Jo’s problems and fun at school, her concern about the farm and her mother’s pregnancy, as well as her joy in playing the piano.

When I point my fingers at the keys,
the music
springs straight out of me.
Right hand
playing notes sharp as
tongues
telling stories while the
smooth
buttery rhythms back me up
on the left.

The rhythm of the words as well as their placement help us hear the driving beat of the music Billie Jo played.
Then personal tragedy strikes. First her baby brother dies, and then her mother is killed because of a kitchen fire. During that accident, Billie Jo’s hands are so badly burned that she can no longer play. In reaction, her father falls into angry drunken depression. The pace of the poems change as the tone of the story changes.

My father stares at me
while I sit across from him at the table,
while I wash dishes in the basin,
my back to him,
the picked and festered bits of my hands in agony.
He stares at me
as I empty the wash water at the roots
of Ma’s apple trees.

The short lines and their repititious nature increase the bleakness of the scene. Unsurprisingly, all of this leads Billie Jo to desperation. She runs away—hopping a freight train. She uses the poem, “Gone West” to describe the ride.

I am stiff and sore.
In two endless days on this train, I have
burned in the desert,
shivered in the mountains,
I have seen the
camps of the dust-bowl migrants
along the tracks.

Young adult readers will be pleased that Billie Jo finds peace in the resolution of the story. She returns home to find her father is returning to normalcy and ready to once again create a family. The journal continues until 1935 with the return of rain to the land and some movement to Billie Jo’s hand. This is not a happily-ever-ending resolution; but it is sufficiently upbeat to provide comfort for the young adult readers. The free-verse format makes the book both a faster read and a more sensory experience than the same story in a conventional novel format. The book will bring the Great Depression and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl alive to readers.
Read More 2 comments | Posted by Nancy edit post
Feb 25

A poem without rhyme-- RIVER VOICE-- by Pat Mora




Introduction:

At the start of a unit on desert environments, read DIG WAIT LISTEN: A DESERT TOAD’S TALE by April Pulley Sayre. Then talk about how water brings life to the desert. Think of ways plants and animals can cope with small amounts of rain.

River Voice
By Pat Mora

In the desert, the river’s voice
is cool, in canyons,
the song of rock and hawk.

In the desert, the rio’s voice
is cool, in valleys,
the song of field and owl.

In the desert, the river’s voice
is cool, at dusk,
The song of star-gleam and moon.

In the desert, the rio’s voice
is cool, at dawn,
The song of wind and fresh light.

From:
Mora, Pat. 1996. CONFETTI: POEMS FOR CHILDREN. Illustrated by Enrique O. Sanchez. New York: Lee & Low Books. ISBN 1-880000-25-3

Extension:
This poem compares the river running through the desert to different sounds, to songs. Try to find comparisons that use the other four senses. Divide the class into four groups. Each group will be given a different sense: taste, touch, sight or smell. Ask the group to list items the river tastes like, feels like, looks like or smells like. The group should try to list at least one item for each person in the group. Then each child will get to create a word art picture. They will each take one of the words on their group’s list and put that word on drawing paper, so that it is part of the landscape.
Later read THE DESERT IS THEIRS by Byrd Baylor.
Read More 0 comments | Posted by Nancy edit post
Feb 16

I'm Up Here by Karla Kuskin

NCTE Award Winning Poet
Karla Kuskin

Introduction
Have the class think of a few things that crawl on the ground. Make a list of what those animals see as they move.
Then make a list of animals that live in trees. What do they see as they move between the branches?
What animals live in the ocean? What does there world look like?
When they go to recess on the playground, what do children see as they run around?

"I’m up here"
By Karla Kuskin

I'm up here.
You're down there.
And nothing in that space between us
But a mile of air.
Where I sale:
Clouds pass.
Where you run:
Green grass.
Where I float:
Birds sing.
One thin thing there is
That hold us close together:
Kite string.

Extension
Have the class work in groups to guess who is talking in the poem. Each group should find at least two hints in the poem that show why they picked the selected narrator. To whom is the narrator speaking? Can they imagine how another toy might see the world? What words would show how that toy felt?

Janeczko, Paul B., ed. 2001. DIRTY LAUNDRY PILE: POEMS IN DIFFERENT VOICES. Illustrated by Melissa Sweet. HarperCollins.
Read More 0 comments | Posted by Nancy edit post
Feb 16

Harlem by Walter Dean Myers



Myers, Walter Dean. 1997. HARLEM. Pictures by Christopher Myers. New York: Scholastic Press. ISBN 0-590-54340-7

Walter Dean Myers was born in West Virginia during the Great Depression, 1937, but was soon sent to Harlem where he lived until he dropped out of high school to join the army. Fortunately, he had a teacher who encouraged him to keep writing, and he did. He was written novels, picture books and biographies as well as books of poetry. HARLEM, like many of his books is written primarily for young adults. It reflects both the discrimination he faced as well as the excitement of living in an area that was and is a cultural center for African Americans.

The book may be read as one long poem that describes the sights, sounds and emotions of Harlem. It begins with a poem that tells how people migrated to Harlem:

They took to the road in Waycross, Georgia
Skipped over the track in East St. Louis
Took the bus from Holly Springs
Hitched a ride from Gee’s Bend

From this beginning the reader has a feel for the entire poem. It is done in free verse, and it tells a story, but it also has a definite rhythm. It might be put to music—perhaps a folk song, or perhaps the blues. It is also possible to read a single page as a complete poem. Each page creates a total image of one scene. For example, Myers describes children playing street games in front of their apartments:

A carnival of children
People the daytime streets
Ring-a-levio warriors
Stickball heroes
Hide-and-seek knights and ladies
Waiting to sing their own sweet songs
Living out their own slam-dunk dreams

Most of the poems include the sounds and music of the area, starting with the origin of the music:

They brought a call, a song
First heard in the villages of Ghana/Mali/Senegal
Calls and song and shouts
Heavy hearted tambourine rhythms

Myers also writes with lilt and tempo about the lilt and tempo of the jazzy at the Cotton Club, the Apollo and the Abyssinian Baptist Church. He evokes the song of informal gospel songs and of instruments playing through funerals. The poetry catches both the excitement and the despair of the people living in Harlem and gives the reader both feelings at the same time.

Myers collaborated with his son, Christopher Myers who created the multimedia illustrations that help bring the area and its population to life. Christopher Myers uses ink, gouache and collage to produce brilliantly colored and many-layered illustrations. The portraits are neither realistic nor abstract, but somewhere in between. This creates the impression that each person in the book represents many people. Similarly, while the book is undoubtedly set in one section of New York City, the illustrations might be any inner city area. The illustrations vary in size from double page to full page to smaller squares as the artist backs away from his subject or moves in closer. They add immeasurably to the poems.
Read More 0 comments | Posted by Nancy edit post
Feb 16

Douglas Florian

Florian, Douglas. 1998. INSECTLOPEDIA. New York: Harcourt, Inc.
ISBN 0-15-201306-7

Florian has composed 21 poems about bugs from ants and dragonflies to beetles and termites. His selected topic is a favorite among elementary school children. He has illustrated each of the poems with a full-page watercolor painting of his own. The accompanying paintings are all colorful and frequently amusing. They are not, however, designed to give the reader an accurate picture of the bug in question.

In addition to the bug theme, the poems are also connected by a sense of whimsy.
For example, the collection begins with a brief rhyming poem entitled "The Caterpillar," which contains the wonderful coined word "Fatterpillar" to describe what happens to caterpillars as they go on their eating spree. It concludes with a succinct description of the last two phases of the animal's life--

Then rents a room inside
A pupa,
And checks out: Madam Butterfly--
How super!

While this poem contains information about the caterpillar’s life cycle and uses the scientific terms, pupa, it is meant to evoke laughter, and it will.
Similarly the poem "The Daddy Longlegs" asks:

How’d you get
Those legs to grow
So very long
And lean in size?
From spiderobic
Exercise?

The word "spiderobic" is enough to make children start to giggle as they envision spiders working out in a gym to the sound of rock music.

All of the poems have a definite rhyme as well as a strong rhythm. Some of them seem to demand that anyone listening to the poem get up and try to move like an insect. For instance, in “The Treehoppers” we read that

They lunge.
They plunge.
They lurch.
The lope.

It is easy to imagine an entire group of children trying to imitate all these motions as they learn these powerful verbs that give a vivid and amusing image of movement.

The words in several of the poems are arranged to give a visual image of the insect. "The Army Ants" starts off with a marching rhythm and a word placement that reinforces the image:

Left
Right
Left
Right

The accompanying painting is covered with a large army of ants marching in formation.
The poem, "The Inchworm," is arranged in a large inverted U. "The Whirligig Beetles," is arranged in a circle, so that it both us with words and placement that the beetles "swim in circles like little toys, without the windup keys or noise." The shape of "The Termites" mirrors the shape of a termite mound.

The last poem in the book is a tribute to "The Mayfly." The poem focuses on the brevity of the mayfly’s life, and the poem is fittingly brief. The poem’s ending seems to serve a double purpose. It bids farewell to the mayfly and to us, the readers.

A day or two
To dance
To fly--
Hello
Hello
Good-bye
Good-bye.

Readers and listeners of all ages will enjoy the poems in this book. However, when reading INSECTLOPEDIA to young children, it would be helpful to have a book of photographs of the actual bugs handy to show the children what animal each poem is describing.
Read More 0 comments | Posted by Nancy edit post
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      Reading and quilting are two of my passions, but I also love swimming (especially in the ocean), exploring the world without reservations or plans, and getting involved in politics.
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