Visit Kellee and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts the hosts for this meme. A great place to find children's books and YA! If you want a better and longer reading list, check them out!
I have been reading all things poetry lately and trying to really get more aquainted with children poets. I recently picked up a few books that were new to me and had to share.
Splash! Poems of Our Watery World by Constance Levy
I am finishing up a unit on earth and earth materials so these poems about water are a great accompaniment to my lessons. I want to share so many but I must pick a couple to give you a taste if you have never seen this book. So, rather than me try to tell you about it, I will let the poems speak for themselves.
Drops
A teardrop
looks like sadness
and has a salty taste.
A raindrop tastes of sky
and brings a shower.
A dewdrop is a new drop,
a taste-of-morning-brew drop
and is probably delicious
to a flower.
Full Moon
on Mirror Lake
Tonight
on this still,
smooth lake
high
in its forest place,
the wandering,
wondering moon
becomes acquainted
with his face.
Water Wizard
I am a wizard of shapes and moods:
I'm ice, I'm fog.
I grow your food.
I quench your thirst,
I flood, I launder,
I mirror, I skip,
I race, I wander.
I dribble and drip,
I float a ship.
I soothe a throat,
I brew your tea.
I swim in you,
you swim in me.
Another poetry book I picked up late last week and plan to share with my students is call Give Yourself to the Rain by Margaret Wise Brown. Here is one of my favorites from the book. It crossed my mind that each student could probably take a line and illustrate it for a class book; might be a neat project.
In the Woods
Silence of the deep green wood
Where little sounds are heard
The flutter of such tiny wings
The buzz and sudden springs
Of grasshoppers flying from the grass
Where the shining beetle traffics pass
Near the roots of the long green grass
And in the birch trees
The rustling of sunlit leaves
The silence of logs, the coldness of stones
Deep in the deep green wood alone
Where the little sounds are heard
And the terrible clap of the wings of a bird
Flying to break
The high silence
Of the still blue sky.
I have been looking for a book of concrete poems, poems that form a picture. I thought these would be fun to share and show the flexibility that poems offer. I found a great one that relates to water again! (I have gotten really lucky)!
Splish Splash by Joan Bransfield Graham, Illustrated by Steve Scott
Here are two that I thought were fun and would be easy for my students to imagine creating.
It was the kind of morning that is filled with a headache and stumbling as my husband and I awoke from a frequently woken slumber. That feeling where you are not refreshed but you are enough to get going, so you do. I have an early meeting, only a minute to spare, so I sat down to write my slice. It reminded me of a poem called Just I wrote a while back; it almost feels like a sequel. I have referenced "staring" in my posts lately because I have that tense end of year feeling. You all know, it is so full of emotions. I have so much I want to do yet I don't really feel like I have a whole lot more to give. I just want to sit in the sand and recharge. But, I will do the day anyway, as many of you will. It will come and go and onto the next and before I know it I will long for school again. 
I love Leo Lionni books. I typically do an author study early in the year because his books speak to working together and solving problems. We will be revisiting his stories this week with a focus on story elements. His stories like It's Mine and Swimmy have such great "problems" and "solutions."
Today I read Oh No, George! to my students. They laughed out loud and were making predictions like crazy! As I said earlier, we are working on story elements and our focus this week is finding the problem and solution within a story. Let's just say this book is full of problems that George finds himself in the middle of. The ending is left a bit, up in the air, and I think we may write our own endings since the kids had great ideas about what George might do next!
Splash! Poems of Our Watery World by Constance Levy
A Notebooks First Page
I got a new purse the other day. As I was un-filling the old and filling up the new I realized there was no way my current notebook was going to fit. Oh no...or...wait, a new notebook!!! And off to the bookstore I went to peruse the newest selection of compact notebooks. Then, there is sat, in my new purse, for a week, no words. Hmmmm. I was a bit perplexed, that first page is always so important, what will it say. Then it hit me, so I wrote. And now, my notebook is officially broken in and ready for action!
