Poetry Friday - This Time

          Michelle Barnes hosts Poetry Friday at Today's Little Ditty with "Five for Friday" and a plea for peace! All the special ideas are explained there! Enjoy her post and others with the riches of poetry!

          This is the time when teachers are excited about their new students, the time to start a year of learning, the time to discover students’ passions, about reading and writing.

         This is the time when teachers have writers notebooks ready, empty and waiting to be filled with words: personal words of happy and sad times, future hopes, observations of the world only children know. Teachers wish to know that world through student eyes, too.

          This is the time when stacks of books wait to be opened, stacks teachers have gathered like flowers all the summer for their students, ready to share the stories that have been written to excite, to inform, to settle in hearts. “I know that one. I read it this summer.” “Oh, I want to read that one. It sounds terrific.” “Make a list for this one. Everyone will want to sign up.” “Look at this cover; it’s about refugees.” “And this one; it’s all about reading. And it’s poetry!”

        This is the perfect time for Amy Ludwig VanDerwater’s new book: Read! Read! Read!, charmingly illustrated by Ryan O'Rourke. From young to old, readers will connect to the poems as life links to their past, or links to the joy of reading that will be coming to them. 

         How letters gather into words, then stories, begins this book's excitement that is reading, where O'Rourke's swirl of letters shows they "sing/into your soul/like soothing/summer rain." Amy lets readers travel on to the heart of reading when one believes it's like flying. And it is, a student discovers, whether reading cereal boxes or the sports pages, exploring in the pages of a book or looking at a map: "I like to hold a whole city/crinkling/in my hands."

        Amy's poems show over and over that reading is more than opening the pages of a book to discover what is there, it's meeting letters and images in life and both interpreting and celebrating them. The fun there lies in the poem, Double Life, where it "builds a treehouse in your head/a haven you can climb to/when you wish to get away."

       New readers can become confused about reading, sometimes believing they're not good readers if they aren't reading book stories, long book stories. However, as these poems show, page after page, reading is a jumble of actions that may make you happy or sad or informed. One poignant example is the poem, Stories, when O'Rourke paints a poignant scene of a young girl and her father finishing Charlotte's Web to accompany Amy's words:"tears heal/broken hearts." 

        Connecting our reading to our lives is what readers do, and the poems in this book show it again and again. Like all of what we read, each poem will spark a connection in children, wanting to share their own reading experiences, in discussions, perhaps in their own poems? The back cover sums it all up with the poem, In Love. It begins "I'm in love/with a poem./No love/could be sweeter."  

        From nature guides to maps to poetry, Amy's book clearly shows reading rocks!  Thanks, Amy and Ryan for this wonderful book!