An enthusiastic invitation for kids to celebrate their animal friends through poetry composition.
A set of children’s poems that versifies about pets while teaching creative writing.
Vardell and Wong (The Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations, 2015, etc.) use animals as centerpieces for this addition to the Poetry Friday Anthology educational series for young readers. There are 12 clusters of poems and activities, and each explores a different poetic concept, such as rhyming, acrostics, rebuses, or found poetry. A simple illustration or puzzle exercise at the start of each section introduces the idea at hand, and the three poems that follow use the concept to build upon one another. Together, they tell a brief story about pets while also exhibiting their lesson. A short prompt at the end of each section gives readers a chance to try writing similar poems themselves. The book is entirely playful in tone—most poems end in jokes—and it encourages students to find their own approach to writing even as the pet theme remains constant. The back of the book contains recommendations for more pet poems that readers can turn into new stories. There are also a handful of exercises that focus on reading comprehension and other nuts-and-bolts writing skills, such as punctuation or capitalization. These are separated out so that each cluster may also be used as a practical, stand-alone minilesson. The fact that the poems use varying rhyme schemes could potentially cause confusion for students writing their own poetry. For example, there’s the in-line rhyme of “Loose tooth, whose tooth? / Boar’s tooth, your tooth,” whose half-rhymes become more awkward to parse when read aloud. Still, the collection has enough nonrhyming exercises that such complexity doesn’t hold it back too much.
An enthusiastic invitation for kids to celebrate their animal friends through poetry composition.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937057-71-8
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Pamelo Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Broccoli: No way is James going to eat broccoli. “It’s disgusting,” says James. Well then, James, says his father, let’s consider the alternatives: some wormy dirt, perhaps, some stinky socks, some pre-chewed gum? James reconsiders the broccoli, but—milk? “Blech,” says James. Right, says his father, who needs strong bones? You’ll be great at hide-and-seek, though not so great at baseball and kickball and even tickling the dog’s belly. James takes a mouthful. So it goes through lumpy oatmeal, mushroom lasagna and slimy eggs, with James’ father parrying his son’s every picky thrust. And it is fun, because the father’s retorts are so outlandish: the lasagna-making troll in the basement who will be sent back to the rat circus, there to endure the rodent’s vicious bites; the uneaten oatmeal that will grow and grow and probably devour the dog that the boy won’t be able to tickle any longer since his bones are so rubbery. Schneider’s watercolors catch the mood of gentle ribbing, the looks of bewilderment and surrender and the deadpanned malarkey. It all makes James’ father’s last urging—“I was just going to say that you might like them if you tried them”—wholly fresh and unexpected advice. (Early reader. 5-9)
Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-14956-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity.
A collection of parental wishes for a child.
It starts out simply enough: two children run pell-mell across an open field, one holding a high-flying kite with the line “I wish you more ups than downs.” But on subsequent pages, some of the analogous concepts are confusing or ambiguous. The line “I wish you more tippy-toes than deep” accompanies a picture of a boy happily swimming in a pool. His feet are visible, but it's not clear whether he's floating in the deep end or standing in the shallow. Then there's a picture of a boy on a beach, his pockets bulging with driftwood and colorful shells, looking frustrated that his pockets won't hold the rest of his beachcombing treasures, which lie tantalizingly before him on the sand. The line reads: “I wish you more treasures than pockets.” Most children will feel the better wish would be that he had just the right amount of pockets for his treasures. Some of the wordplay, such as “more can than knot” and “more pause than fast-forward,” will tickle older readers with their accompanying, comical illustrations. The beautifully simple pictures are a sweet, kid- and parent-appealing blend of comic-strip style and fine art; the cast of children depicted is commendably multiethnic.
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4521-2699-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
