Chapter 5 and authors

Chapter five also had a lot of helpful information about poetry. I’m with you Mrs. Pickett. I’m not a big fan of poetry. However, I think today’s poetry is much better than the poetry that I remember when I was going to school. I remember trying to analyze it and figure out what the poet was trying to say. I found that so hard to do so I didn’t like it. The book does say one way to turn kids off to poetry is by doing just that and drilling the kids on the various rhyme schemes. I can also see how picking the right kind of poetry books can also make a big difference in getting students to either love poetry or hate it. The book says you have to make sure you pick poetry books that the kids will enjoy and that they can relate to. It also says that we should read different kinds of poetry to the kids to give them a taste of something different from the poetry buffet.
I like the fact that they have various books on poetry on different topics that you can incorporate into a lesson plan. I don’t remember there being poetry books that you could use with a math lesson or geography lesson back when I went to school. Kids these days have so many poetry books that they can choose from.

A good poetry book that I read was Shel Silverstein's Falling up book and it was funny. It's a good poetry book to get kids started with poetry I think. The poetry rhymes and it is funny. I really enjoyed reading it even though it's for kids. Shel Silverstein also has a cool website for kids. His website is http://www.shelsilverstein.com/. It has games, puzzles, coloring books and other activities for kids. It also has lesson plan activities for teachers. Shel Silverstein was the first author to have a children's book go the the New York Times best seller list.

Fold Me A Poem is obviously another book about poems. Except this book is about origami. The author is Kristine O'Connell George. Her book is full of pictures of various animals made out of origami. Little kids might enjoy this book. It has very colorful pictures and at the end it gives you the name of books that you can get to learn how to do origami. Her website: http://www.kristinegeorge.com/ also has a link where it shows you how to do an origami dog and it also has gives you some sample lesson plans to use in your classroom. You can also listen to some of her poetry at her website.

Chick Chicka 1 2 3 is another book I found. This book is written by Bill Martin Jr, Michael Sampson and Lois Ehlert. It is a book about numbers. This book can probably be used for pre-k or kinder. Kids can learn how to count to 20 and how to count to 100 by tens and they also learn how to count by 10 backwards from 100. This book can obviously be incorporated into a math lesson.