With this month’s issue of PaperTigers being all about play, I picked up a Canadian poetry book chock full of rhymes one can skip, clap, bounce a ball or do actions to. The book is called Eenie Meenie Manitoba by Robert Heidbreder, illustrated by Scot Ritchie (Kids Can Press, 1996.) I’ve featured one of Heidbreder’s other poetry books in a previous post, and was also at the same time, quite happy to discover this book!
Eenie Meenie Manitoba explores Canadian geography in such delightful rhyming poems as “Toronto-to-to,” “Horsing Around BC,” “On the Rideau,” and “Charlottetown Fishmongers.” In this huge country with such wildly diverse landscapes, climates and cultures, it’s great to find a book that attempts to cover all the ‘bases’ so to speak! Alongside some poems are directions on how to use the rhymes in play. For example, to the poem “To Be, or Not To Be,” one can pull petals off of a daisy in the way people used to with the old ’she loves me, she loves me not’ rhyme. “Apple Me Dapple Me” is a good poem to bounce a ball to. And for skipping, there’s “Nova Scotia Lobsters.” The trick is to memorize the poem so one can use it in play. Summer is a good time to try out these rhymes and get your kids and yourselves outside with a bit of rope and a ball.
This week’s Poetry Friday host is Carol at Carol’s Corner.
See Saw Saskatchewan is a children’s collection of poems about Canada by Robert Heidbreder, illustrated by Scot Ritchie (Kids Can Press, 2003.) I found out about this delightful book from librarian Sue Fisher’s blog, Mousetraps and the Moon. For National Poetry Month which was April, Sue featured various children’s poetry books on her blog.
See Saw Saskatchewan is a playful collection of poems that can be skipped to, ball-bounced to, or clapped to. The poems are about life in Canada in various locations featuring activities, or animals, or sights particular to the locale. There’s definitely a touch of Dennis Lee in these poems that’s detectable in such poems that play on Canadian place names like in ‘Niagara Falls’:
Kapuskasing sings
Cornwall calls
Thunder Bay storms,
And Niagara
FALLS!
In fact there are a lot of playful references to famous children’s rhymes which you can tell by the titles of some of the poems like ‘Pick a peck of P.E.I.’ or ‘Take Toronto by the Toe’. I had to laugh at the poem referring to my home city of Winnipeg: ‘Winnipeg Mosquitoes’. Yes, we do often have them and in enough abundance, to make them poetry-worthy! There’s a cute illustration of two besotted mosquitoes sucking blood out of a finger, which vaguely reminded me of a line from John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ — “wherein two bloods mingled be” — except in this case it’s the reverse with the blood of one Canadian ‘mingled’ into two lovelorn mosquitoes! Now if that isn’t an image of Canadian love, I don’t know what is.
Do you know of any good poetry books that celebrate your locale? Or play with the funny names of your towns and cities? In Canada, we have some great place names like Moose Jaw and Nipissing, Tumbler Ridge and Nanaimo. See Saw Saskatchewan does a nice job of making Canada a fun place to read about with its delightful poems set all over the land.
This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by jama at jama rattigan’s alphabet soup.
