Are You Ready?

Are you ready? April is National Poetry Month, so why not try reading a poem each day?  We all love Jack Prelutsky and Shel Silverstein. What about some new poets?  Here are some suggestions for great poetry selections:

Alexander, Kwame and Chris Colderley.  2017. Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.

Coombs, Kate.  2012. Water Sings Blue: Ocean Poems. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Florian, Douglas. 2012. UnBEElievables: honeybee poems and paintings. NY: Beach Lane Books.

Grimes, Nikki. 2017.  One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance. USA: Bloomsbury.

Harley, Avis. 2008. The Monarch’s Progress: Poems with Wings. Honesdale, PA: WordSong.

Heard, Georgia. 1998.  Awakening the Heart.  Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, K-6

Heard, Georgia and Lester Laminack. 2008. Reading and Writing Across the Year. Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann, K-2

Holbrook, Sara. 2003. By Definition. Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mills Press.

Ludwig VanDerwater, Amy.  2013. Forest Has a Song: Poems. NY: Clarion Books.

Worth, Valerie.1996. All the Small Poems and Fourteen More.  NY: Farrar, Straus.

Vardell, Sylvia and Janet Wong. 2012. The Poetry Friday Anthology. NJ: Pomelo Books,

Wong, Janet. 2007. Twist: Yoga Poems. NY: Margaret K. McElderry Books.

Young, Judy.  2006. R is for Rhyme: A Poetry Alphabet. Ann Arbor, MI: Sleeping Bear Press.

Try to pair two poems to make a mini-study of a concept, theme, structure, or perspective? In the space of a class period, it’s possible to employ multiple reading strategies your class has studied this year, just by putting two poems side by side and engaging your students’ curiosity. Consider comparing and contrasting “Dragonfly” by Constance Levy from Splash: Poems of Our Watery World and “The Dragonfly” from Insectlopedia  by Douglas Florian. The first is written in third person, and Florian’s poem is written in first person. Levy writes about the dragonfly as a giver of life, and Florian writes about the dragonfly as a taker of life. There’s so much more! If you send me an e-mail at lynnedorfman@comcast.net, I will send these poems to you as an email attachment.

Happy Poetry Month, Slicers!

I am participating in #SOL17. Thanks to the twowritingteachers
blog team for creating and sustaining this wonderful community of slicers!