What kids don't like animals? This book is a great way to introduce poetry by using a familiar topic in a fun way such as alliteration. Poems include furry animals, farmyard animals, snails, caterpillars, ponies, dragonflies, wasps, honey bears, pets, cats, birds, kangaroos, crocodiles, leopards and lions! It also has poems about going to the zoo and the animal fair! This list sounds like so much fun to bring into an early childhood classroom! The illustrations are amazing and open a world of imagination.
The poems are not only fun, they are very informational to children who are learning characterisitcs of animals. Here is one example of a wasps.
Wasps in brightly coloured vests,
Chewing wood to make their nests.
Wasps, like rockets, Zooming High,
Then dropping down where peaches lie.
And then dragon-fly
When the heat of the summer
Made drowsy the land,
A dragon-fly came
And sat on my hand.
With its blue jointed body,
And wings like spun glass,
It lit on my fingers
As though they were grass.
These two examples are more informational than some of the others. Some of the poems are silly and for fun. These two particular ones could be used in a unit on Insects. They tell of the bugs in a fun way but also describe them to a certain degree.
I would use this book in my classroom throughout the entire year. As you do units on winter and hibernation you could use the bear poems. As you talk about animals in other countries you could use the poems on Kangaroos.
This book serves multipurposes but also can be used just for fun. It is a great tool to bring poetry into a classroom.
I really enjoyed reading your blog mdean!!! I like the way you incorporated examples to help your readers obtain a better understanding of the book. I am also planning to incorporate one of the poems from the book I chose in my blog.
ReplyDeleteI love your idea of using poetry to help children learn information about animals. I've never thought about using poetry to actually gain information about a topic. Another idea you could do with this book is let the children write an informational poem about certain topics throughout the year. They could write a poem about the rock cycle, dividing, and many other topics. I think this book would be a great tool to let the children see examples of how to write a poem that gives factual information. You did a very good job on your post. I found it very interesting! Thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Maggie, bringing in animals would be something the students would enjoy and probably relate to. I think you could use these poems to help students understand certain units, like you said the insect unit, better. For those poems you said are more silly, maybe those could be a treat to tack on to the end of a unit or when reviewing for a test. Students could even have to write their own poems about real charactersitics of an animal after hearing a silly poem read to them. This book sounds like it would spark their imagination which is so important. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of keeping this book in your classroom year-round. I think it'd be great to integrate some science lessons with this book. You could use this book to open a poetry lesson or to open a science lesson on animals. It also seems like a great book to just keep in your classroom library for paired reading. This sounds like a fun book! Great post!
ReplyDeleteWhat fun this book seems to be Maggie!! On all the blogs I have read it seems that we could integrate most of them throughout the curriculum to help children have a better understanding of poetry and in your case Science. I was one who thought poetry was very boring, but after reading my book and reading all of the blogs; I now have a different outlook on poetry!
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