This illustrator,Meilo So, seems to be very in tune with his audience. As soon as you open the front cover you are staring at what looks to be a kids wall, bulletin board, or locker. The two pages are covered with lists, stories, posters, reminders, rhyming words, poem starters and more. This is a perfect picture to use when brainstorming with students, "reasons why we write". I think these pages would draw a reader in, helping them to become motivated to read the book and to write their own material.
Jack Prelutsky, the author, writes a letter to his readers in the first few pages of his book. This letter came across as kid-centered and kid-intended. He writes, " I have lots of fun playing with words and ideas and 'solving' the poem...Maybe you'll even be inspired to write some poems from scratch. I surely hope so." He makes writing seem fun, creative and something to be shared. In this letter he explains why he wrote this book. A few years ago, he created a website for teachers and children. This website was designed to help students write poetry and share it publicaly. He based this poetry writing on "poemstarts", where he would start a poem off with a few lines and then the student would finish the poem. He shares goofy examples to show children that poetry can be fun and lighthearted. He then turned this website idea into a book, "Read a Rhyme, Write a Rhyme."
What a great idea for reluctant writers, or writers that just need a little push to get started. Poetry writing is broken down into "do-able" steps and there are ample examples from child writers throughout the book. There are also great illustrations and brainstorming prompts to help get the imaginations going. Another touch that the author added, which I loved, is this big stop sign in the beginning of the book asking readers not to write in the book. He writes, "I have something important to ask you - PLEASE DON'T WRITE IN THIS BOOK. It is beautifully printed on very fine paper, and it would be a shame to scribble in it. Also, if you write in it, you're likely to ruin things for someone else..." Was this guy ever a teacher? It sure sounds like it! I thought this one comment showed his love of books and the importance of taking care of these gifts.
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3 comments:
Meaghan,
I absolutely love this book! It is a user friendly guide to poetry writing! As you read the examples and then read the poem starters, it makes the reader feel like they are just as good a poet as Jack Prelutsky hiself!
I love the design on the inside of the front and back covers. We are completely on the same page with the notion of using these pages for a brainstorming activity. It brings a hint of realism to the kids and will hopefully help them realize that there are many reasons why we need to know how to write. Especially in our world of writing prompts and text messaging, it is refreshing not only for the students but the teacher as well to talk about different types of writing.
Jack Prelutsky’s opening letter was enjoyable to read. It is nice to learn about his intention for creating this book and where the idea all came from I agree that he seems to truly enjoy what he does. I feel the part about his website would really attract and challenge the students to participate. The following warning page is excellent as well! I wonder if he ever had experience in the classroom too! I will have to Google him to see what kind of biographical information I can find!
The 10 topics and poems that correlate to the topics were every fun and easy to read. I like the fact that the topics are about things that most kids would be able to relate to (i.e. animals, weather, friends themselves). When I taught 5th grade, I had my kids publish poetry books. I remember struggling to try and find different styles of poems to model for the kids. I ended up writing half of them myself! I love how this book has different styles of poetry (i.e. rhyme, free style, list poems). I also like how he uses different rhyming patterns for his rhyming poems (i.e.: ABA, AABB, ABBB, AAAB). It is important for the kids to see that there is no one way to write poetry and they may be stronger with one style than another.
The poem starters are really written well for the kids. As I was reading them, I tried to read from the eyes of one of my students. Along with the poem starter, he provides simple yet direct explanations, offers ideas, advice and then leaves it up to the new writer. I feel that these instructions are detailed enough for the kids to know what their boundaries are but also not overwhelming. I was almost inspired to start creating some poems!
The illustrations were wonderful too. If Melio So was trying to make this a fun happy book, he did a great job! The colors are bright and the characters drawn really add that extra dimension to the poems. It is definitely a perfect marriage of text and illustrations.
As I stated at the beginning of my blog, I absolutely love this book! Our school currently has a challenge teacher who goes into the classrooms to work on fun projects like this. I am going to let her know about the website and maybe she can make it a school wide event!
Meaghan,
I am very excited to report that I have had the chance to use this book in my 3rd grade classroom! We are fortunate enough to have a wonderful challenge teacher who networks local artists to come and work with specific grades for a week at a time. Our 3rd graders will be having the pleasure of welcoming Thomasina Levy, Native American poet, musician and storyteller as their Artist-in-Residence this week. She will be working on multiple types of poetry writing with the students. In order to prepare for her visit, I had my 3rd graders practice their poetry skills through some of the activities in this book.
It seems as of this year has been a marathon of narrative writing. While the kids were excited to write something new, they were very cautious about writing poetry. They instantly began to state that they couldn’t do it, it was too hard etc…I ended up using the book as a read aloud at first. We went through each poem starter and looked at the additional suggestions provided by Jack Prelutsky. When we were done, I had the class vote on which one they wanted to try. The majority voted on the birthday poem. After a little brainstorming off of some of Jack’s suggestions, the students were on a roll! When they were finished with their final product, they were so proud of themselves they wanted to write about the same topic just in a different poetic format. It was an extremely successful experience and they are looking forward to showing off their poems to our guest! I am very excited to see what other kinds of poetry they are able to produce! Read a Rhyme, Write a Rhyme, has proven to be an effective, user friendly tool to motivate the resistant student to explore the world of poetry!
Amy,
As you know I was also able to use this book in the classroom recently. Unfortunately, preparation for the CMTs caused our classroom to focus on only expository writing for a few months. From that genre, we moved into report writing. While informational writing is certainly important, it has somewhat stifled some of our creative writing skills. This week I had planned on writing Mother's Day poems with my students. To get the creative poetry juices flowing I used some of Jack Prelutsky's tactics.
First I read some of the poems included in Read a Rhyme, Write a Rhyme. We were able to discuss the differences between poetry and other genres of writing. We talked about the freedom poetry offers, with both content and grammar and punctuation. We laughed over some funny lines and clapped out the rhythms we heard in the poems. This definitely loosened us up to write some poems of our own.
Using the poem starts helped the students in my classroom get started - which always seems to be the most difficult part of writing! What was most helpful was giving the students a rhythm to work off of. We had done some work with poetry earlier in the year, but focused on aspects of poetry such as personification and metaphors. This book lent itself to a lesson in rhythm, in a way that was fun and motivating. Because poetry can be written in many different forms, I think it is important to use multiple books and examples to show students the different directions they can take. It certainly helped with my class. As they wrote their Mother's Day poems, it was interesting how some used the fun rhythmic approach for their inspiration while others focused on the use of figurative language.
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