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South by Patrick McDonnell
The first two-page spread of this gorgeous little picture book made me catch my breath. On the left we see the top half of a tree, bare of leaves and full of little yellow birds, all looking in the same direction and each with a pair of eighth-notes hanging in the air overhead. On the right, it's the same view of the same tree, and all the birds are on the wing and flying out of sight. So minimal, but you can feel the chill in the air, hear their wings, see them fly.

The rest of the book is just as expressive, just as minimal, and displays, in a way that is probably difficult to discern in a tiny newspaper strip, just how good Patrick McDonnell, the creator of Mutts, is with a brush. Big hearts come in small packages sometimes.

Would make a lovely thank-you gift for a friend who has helped when you were in a jam, a talented teacher, or someone who has just pointed you on your way. I'll have to remember this one at the end of the school year.

Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the Target gift card. God knows she can use it. A Staples gift card works too, or one from Amazon (heh heh). But in our family, we always give a book. Each of the books on this list works well as a tribute to the man or woman who has sacrificed economic prosperity (and probably his or her immune system) so that your child's mind may have been properly cared for and nurtured this year.



Ms. MacDonald Has a Class by Jan Ormerod
Just what it sounds like, a reworking of "Old MacDonald" set in the classroom, with happy children dancing and creating and taking a field trip to a farm. Anyone who likes kids (as teachers, we hope, do) will enjoy Jan Ormerod's beautiful, spunky, active drawings of the multicultural kindergarten kids.




How the Tiny People Grew Tall by Nancy Wood
I came across this "original creation tale" in Daedalus Books - I don't think it's in our library. The title makes it an obvious choice as a gift for those brave individuals whose job it is to foster the intellectual development of our children, so I was kind of expecting a tiresome hammer-and-nails fable. But when I opened it up, I was pleasantly surprised to find an entertaining, thought-provoking, good-looking story about how new experiences and generous guides create brave, thoughtful, resourceful, smart people. A sparkling, clever, good-hearted gift - not too much text for kindergartners, enough to think about for maybe up to 4th or 5th grade.




I Will Make Miracles by Susie Morgenstern, illustrated by Jiang Hong Chen
Reviewed by me earlier, this book is a sumptuous gift. Not that expensive, but large and wide, it's a slab of toothy board saturated with deep inky color. A pleasure to hold. And as a gift, it's not just about the miracles the child might accomplish, but it's also a tribute to the incremental miracles that the teacher performs with every kid, every year. I'm hoping to get a tear out of the first grade teacher with this one.




To Be Like the Sun by Susan Marie Swanson and Margaret Chodos-Irvine
Reviewed earlier by me. The seed-flower metaphor is used (a lot) in the educational context, and I might hesitate to drag it out one more time, if it weren't for To be like the Sun. There is the potential encapsulated in the tiny seed, then there is the nurturing sun and rain and human helper, yeah yeah, but in To be like the Sun, we see the plant grow and produce its own seeds, which the little girl saves over the winter to plant in the spring.



Magic Beach by Crockett Johnson
An uncompleted manuscript by author of Harold and the Purple Crayon, Magic Beach has been published with all the pencil lines and erasures intact. It's a lovely story. Two bored little kids wander along the beach wishing they had a snack. They soon discover that they can conjure up whatever they want by writing its name in the sand - when the waves wash away the words, the words are replaced by the real thing.

This is strong stuff about possibility and dreams and actuation and the power of words. Suitable for teachers of upper grades, for graduates, as a wedding gift, and it's even a great book to read to kids.

Continued from the Previous Post...

Picture Books
From Spain

Sebastian's Roller Skates
Written by Joan de Deu Prats
Illustrated by Francesc Rovira

Picture Books for Older Readers
From Australia

Fox
Written by Margaret Wild
Illustrated by Ron Brooks

I need to tred lightly when discussing this title, because it is dark, sad, and ultimately, a tale of deception. I don't want to give away the storyline for those who have not read it, but it is certainly a book that will haunt readers and have you thinking about friendship, temptation and betrayal long after the book has been closed.

Several middle school teachers - upon first reading Fox - mentioned the story's similiarities to Shakespeare's Macbeth and several of these teachers use Fox in their classroom as an introduction to this classic work.

Whether you're dealing with playground disagreements or boardroom arguments, this book is an emotional and startling look at the realities of life and working or dealing with others.

First Fiction
From Australia
Jack Russell: Dog Detective
(Book 4): The Lying Postman

The Lying Postman is - by far - my favorite book from the Jack Russell series. Involving a new postman to Jack's route, and a "he said," "she-said" situation, Book #4 in this canine caper series keeps readers guessing until the end as to whether or not the postman is telling the truth.

Also introduced in this mystery is a new character - Ralf Boxer - a little chihuahua who surprises Jack with his courage and shatters every stereotype that Jack has regarding these small dogs.

Gift Books
From Australia

Could You? Would You?
by Trudy White

Trudy has made a fine book for readers of all ages with Could You? Would You? I've personally used this book as a discussion starter with both my four-year-old son and with adult friends. Others that I know have used this book in writing workshops to help get through writer's block.

Be careful though - many of these questions will bring up childhood memories which may have you longing for the times when you could cuddle in a sheet-made fortress under the stars or thinking about what you'd like to do with the time you have left.

What's your favorite Kane/Miller book?

I love the poetry of Langston Hughes. I used to read poems from his book The Dream Keeper to my second grade students. I always shared poems from the book when I read them Coming Home: from the Life of Langston Hughes, a picture book biography that was written and illustrated by Floyd Cooper.

Today, I’m reviewing Tony Medina’s book of "autobiographical" poems about Langston Hughes entitled Love to Langston. As the front flap of the book jacket states: “Each poem explores an important event or theme in Hughes’ life, from his lonely childhood and the racism he overcame, to his love of travel and his ultimate success as a writer.” In his introduction, Medina tells readers that his book “captures glimpses of Langston’s life in the art form he cherished most—poetry.” The book's poems are narrated in the voice of Langston Hughes.

LOVE TO LANGSTON
Written by Tony Medina
Illustrated by R. Gregory Christie
Lee & Low, 2002

The fourteen poems contained in the book give us glimpses not only of events and themes in Hughes’ life—but also a peek inside the man, his thoughts and emotions. Because Medina speaks in the voice of Hughes, the poems seem personal. It's as if the poet is talking directly to and confiding in the book’s readers.

Following are excerpts from Love to Langston, which I hope will give you a flavor of Medina’s free verse poetry in the book:

Langston speaks of libraries being special places for him in his poem Libraries.

From Libraries

to sit and to stay
with books and books
and books of endless

beautiful words

keeping me company
taking my loneliness
and blues

away


He explains his feelings for his father in another poem:

From I Do Not Like My Father Much

My father is a man who could not do what
he wanted to do or be what he wanted to be
so he takes out his pain on everyone
even his own family

His anger causes me pain
just the same

No, I do not like my father much


He tells of his love for his favorite place in Harlem Is the Capital of My World:

Harlem is a bouquet of black roses
all packed together and protected
by blackness and pride…

Yeah, Harlem is where I be—
where I could be
Me
Harlem is the capital of my world


In Jazz Makes Me Sing, Langston relates how the music “makes me/think about my sadness/and how I ain’t alone/The blues makes me feel/a whole lot better/It hits my heart in/the funny bone.”


In Poetry Means the World to Me, he expresses the importance of poetry in his life.

From Poetry Means the World to Me

Poetry means the world to me
it’s how I laugh and sing
how I cry and ask why…

Poetry is what I use
To say
I love you


The fourteen “glimpses” into the life of Langston Hughes also: show us a young boy learning about his people from listening to the stories his grandma tells him; speak of the prejudice he faced in school and about Jim Crow; recall his high school days when he lived in a white neighborhood where his white friends were immigrants and outsiders like him; and tell about his travels to many different places around the world.

Medina modeled some of his poems in Love to Langston after poems Hughes wrote for The Dream Keeper: Grandma’s Stories evokes Aunt Sue’s Stories and Sometimes Life Ain’t Always a Hoot echoes the sentiments expressed in Mother to Son.

In the back matter, Medina includes Notes for Love to Langston. In these detailed notes, the author provides information about the poet’s life and background information for each of the poems. Love to Langston is an excellent book to share with students during Black History Month--or any time of the school year.


Classroom Connections

• Read Coming Home to your students along with a few poem selections from The Dream Keeper.
• Continue to read two or three poems a day from The Dream Keeper for a period of four or five days.
• Then share and discuss the fourteen poems in Love to Langston.
• Follow up your reading of Love to Langston with readings of selected poems from the book—along with the detailed notes about those particular poems.
• Read Grandma’s Stories and Aunt Sue’s Stories, Sometimes Life Ain’t Always a Hoot and Mother to Son. Discuss the poems with your students and talk about the similarities in Hughes’ and Medina’s poems.
• It would be great to have several paperback copies of The Dream Keeper in your classroom. Some of the poems in the book are short and would be easy for children to memorize. You could let children peruse the book and select poems they might like to memorize and recite for their classmates or share with them in a choral reading exercise.
  

Here are links to some poems written by Langston Hughes:

Dream Variations

Dreams

Harlem

I, Too

Mother to Son

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Theme for English B

From Random House: More than twenty poems excerpted from Vintage Hughes



Click here to read about the career and poetry of Langston Hughes.

Karen Edmisten is hosting the Poetry Friday Roundup this week.

THE GROWING STORY
Written by Ruth Krauss
Illustrated by Helen Oxenbury
HarperCollins, 2007

This is a simple story about a little boy who wonders if he will grow bigger. In spring, he notices that everything around him is growing—the grass, buds on trees, flowers on the side of the barn—and asks his mother if the baby chicks, his puppy, and he will grow too. His mother assures him that they all will grow.

A little time passes and the boy continues to see changes in the world around him. The days grow longer and the nights shorter. The grass grows faster, the flowers higher, and the leaves bigger. “We’re growing too,” the little boy assures the chicks and his puppy. When the days grow warmer, the little boy and his mother fold up his warm pants and his warm coat and put them away in a box. His mother informs him that he will put them on again once summer is past.

Summer progresses into autumn—all the while the roses and honeysuckle have bloomed, the corn has gotten taller than a man, and the pears have ripened. Even the chicks and puppy have grown up. The little boy wonders to himself if he is really growing. It is not until the cold weather returns and the little boy puts on his warm clothes once again that he realizes he HAS grown. The pants are too tight and the legs are too short. The sleeves on his jacket are also too short. Excited, he somersaults outside and announces to the chicks (that are now hens) and his puppy (who is now a big dog): “I’m growing too.”

This is most certainly a story to which young children can relate. They are always eager to grow taller and older so they can be like the “big” kids. Krauss’s text addresses the subject matter with plain and simple language—and lots of repetition, echoing the boy’s persistent questions and the perpetual changes in the plants and animals he sees all about him over the course of several months. This is a lovely tale about a child’s desire to grow up told in the context of seasonal changes.

I have never seen the original edition of THE GROWING STORY that was illustrated by Phyllis Rowand and published in 1947. I can’t imagine that the illustrations in the earlier edition could have complemented and interpreted the text of this story any better than Oxenbury’s illustrations.

Oxenbury sets the story on a farm in the countryside. She uses a palette of soft colors in her paintings. Her realistic watercolors and black and white drawings are the perfect mate for this old classic. Oxenbury is adept at drawing facial expressions, body language, and physical positions of the little boy, his mother, and the animals so that they display the characters’ feelings of wonder, love, excitement, comfort, and happiness.

The artist varies her illustrations in this book—some are two-page full color spreads with no frames or borders, some are smaller close-up illustrations of the boy and his mother in color, some are black and white drawings of the dog and hens. In two of the large paintings, the boy and his dog are but a tiny part of the illustrations—in effect, showing readers this boy’s sense of feeling so small in a world where everything seems to be growing but him. A two-page spread of the boy and his mother walking through an orchard of blossoming fruit trees is a glory of white blossoms, sunlight, and shadows.

THE GROWING STORY is a real charmer of a book. There is so much more to tell you about the ways Oxenbury employed every bit of the book from the front cover and endpapers to the back cover to enhance and extend the meaning of Krauss’s tale—but you’re just going to have to find yourself a copy and read it to see why I love this little gem of a picture book!

Classroom Connection for Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers: I think it would be a great idea to read this book to a small group or class of young children at the beginning of the school year and then measure their heights. At the end of the year, the story could be reread to the children and they could be measured once again. The children could then compare their heights to see how much they had grown from September to June.

POETRY BOOK PARTNERS

I’M SMALL AND OTHER VERSES
Written by Lilian Moore
Illustrated by Jill McElMurry
Candlewick Press, 2001

This collection contains short poems for very young children about such subjects as the following: wearing a snowsuit, sneezing, peanut butter, waiting, finger painting, playing in the sand, and growing.

Growing
by Lilian Moore

I’m taller today
but nobody knows.
I looked in the mirror
way up on my toes.
For the very first
I saw
my
NOSE!

I NEVER DID THAT BEFORE
Written by Lilian Moore
Illustrated by Lilian Hoban
Atheneum, 1995

This collection, which is now out of print, contains poems that speak to the experiences of very young children: hanging upside down on the monkey bars for the very first time, wearing a new pair of sneakers, going for a walk with an understanding grandpa, sliding downhill on a sled alone, and outgrowing last year’s coat.

From The Coat in My Closet

I opened the closet and
there was my coat—
the coat that I wore last year…

“I don’t reach your knees,”
the coat complained.
“Whatever did you do?”

“Coat,” I explained,
“I grew.”

SPRING IS

Spring is when
the morning sputters like
bacon…

spring is when
your scrambled eggs
jump
off
the
plate
and turn into a million daffodils
trembling in the sunshine.


The Language of Poetry

Those excerpts are taken from Bobbi Katz’s Spring Is, one of my favorite poems about this season. Doesn’t Katz capture the excitement a child might feel when spring has finally arrived in all its glory and the world is warm again, and alive, and waiting to be unwrapped like a long-awaited gift?

Katz follows the lead set by Spring Is with her poems in ONCE AROUND THE SUN. For this book, she wrote twelve poems. She lists the signs she associates with each month. She begins all the poems in the same fashion as Spring Is. Here are the opening lines of her poem about April:

April is
when the earth
parades in a green so brand-new
you can almost hear it playing a tune,
turning tight buds
of forsythia bushes
into tiny yellow trumpets…

And here is how she begins her poem about May:

May is
when the sky unties
a secret song bag
early every morning,
and the birds fly out…

I love these images Katz fashions with words. They are fresh. They certainly aren’t trite or clichéd.

Signs of Spring
I was an elementary teacher for many years. I still remember the ubiquitous “spring is” writing exercises we teachers often had children do in class to celebrate the arrival of spring. Often the children’s poems came out something like this:

Spring is flowers
and birds singing.
Spring is green grass
and warm weather.
Spring is when
I fly my kite.

Speaking from my experience as a classroom teacher, I can tell you that once I began sharing all kinds of poetry with my students, many of them began writing poetry with more inventive images like those found in the poems written by Bobbi Katz and with more of the elements of language characteristic of poetry. I think it’s equally important to give children ample time to carefully observe the world around them in mid-spring--to give them opportunities to really look at, study, and think about the changes in nature. They will then be more likely to write poems with more depth, poems that express their personal thoughts and feelings.


Let’s look at excerpts from some other excellent poems about spring that would be great to share with children.

The poems in John Updike’s A CHILD’S CALENDAR are filled with examples of particular sights, sounds, and smells that he associates with each month of the year. Here are two examples of similes he uses to describe two signs of spring from his poem about March.

From March

The sun is nervous
As a kite
That can’t quite keep
Its own string tight…

Pale crocuses
Poke through the ground
Like noses come
To sniff around.

Imagine comparing the spring sun to a nervous kite and crocuses to noses sniffing around.


In PIECES: A YEAR IN POEMS & QUILTS, Anna Grossnickle Hines writes poetry about all four seasons. Here are excerpts from Do You Know Green?, which is one of her poems about spring.

Green comes…
tickling the tips
of twiggy tree fingers…

poking up as tiny
slips of baby grass…

bursting out on bare
brown branches…

Look at how Hines uses personification here. In her poem, green is poking and bursting and tickling twiggy tree fingers.

One of the jobs of a poet is to be precise with language, to select just the right words to express thoughts and feelings, and to help readers picture the poet’s written images in their minds. Pointing out to students poets’ similes, metaphors, imagery, use of personification and alliteration, and selected use of words helps them to better understand the elements of language often found in poetry and helps expand their writing vocabulary and knowledge of the genre.

(I found making transparencies of poems and showing them to students on an overhead projector was a fine way to lead my students into a brief discussion of the poems.)


In A CIRCLE OF SEASONS, Myra Cohn Livingston makes wonderful use of personification to bring spring and all its wonders alive.

Today my acrostic poem is for Jules and Eisha, the dynamic duo of the 7-Imp blog. The ladies give us book reviews for people of all ages, interviews, Poetry Friday posts, and their very popular 7–Imp's 7 Kicks weekend feature. Seven Impossible Things is one fine kidlit blog.

For Jules and Eisha, I’ve chosen a poem from WHAT’S IN A WORD, a collection of acrostics I finished work on last fall. Since the ladies of 7-Imp are such good friends, I thought the following selection would be most appropriate. We all know how close chums share secrets with each other.


Words
Hushed
In soft velvet
Sounds
Patter into your
Ear
Revealing deep secrets that no one
Should hear.


For years, I hadn’t been a big fan of acrostic poems. So many of the ones I’d read, written by both adults and children, seemed too prosaic. Few were lyrical in nature; few had figurative language; and few had any rhythm—which, to me, is a poetic requirement. But I changed my mind about acrostics when I read SILVER SEEDS: A BOOK OF NATURE POEMS. Written by Paul Paolilli and Dan Brewer and illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher, SILVER SEEDS is the best book of acrostic poems for children that I have read. This collection of fifteen poems takes readers through one day. It opens with a poem about Dawn and closes with a poem about Night. It includes other poems about a shadow, a hummingbird, a butterfly, trees, clouds, stars and the moon.

Today I have a parody for Anne at Book Buds. Book Buds was one of the first kidlit blogs that I became addicted to early last fall. I won Books Bud’s “First Words” contest with a humorous poem and received a signed copy of Catherine Thimmesh’s wonderful book TEAM MOON. How great is that? Anne is one of the bloggers responsible for creating the Cybils. I wonder if she’s got any other bright ideas planned for the kidlitosphere this year???


THIS LITTLE PIGGY
by Elaine Magliaro

This little piggy went to Saturn.
This little piggy went to Mars.
This little piggy zoomed his rocket ship
Around a zillion stars.
But THIS little piggy read comic books
At home
And smoked cigars.

I have always enjoyed parodies. One of my best friends and I used to make up silly lyrics to popular rock-and-roll tunes when we were in high school…during the Jurassic Period.


CLASSROOM CONNECTIONS FOR TEACHERS: Writing Parodies

Writing & Literature Connection
What could be more fun than having students write parodies of nursery rhymes in class? If you’ve got Judy Sierra’s book MONSTER GOOSE on hand, you’re all set with an entire collection of hilarious parodies to serve as models for your students’ writing.

MONSTER GOOSE
Written by Judy Sierra
Illustrated by Jack E. Davis
Gulliver Books/Harcourt
2001

Here are two parodies from MONSTER GOOSE: