It's a Blog Tour - With Eight Legs & Poetry Friday!

           It's a blog tour and Poetry Friday hosted by Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference.            

        It's a perfect time for this new book to be born, alongside spring's awakening, and seeing more spiders, too, at least here in Colorado and other places moving out of a winter climate. 

          Non-fiction poetry books hold exceptional learning experiences, including literacy, natural history, art, and science all at the same time. Adults, including teachers, plus children, can take one wonderful book and begin a study on that topic, later also using the book as a mentor text for further studies of other topics. Leslie Bulion's words - prose and poetry plus Robert Meganck's illustrations offer so very much in every one of these areas. Additionally, if you're like one of my young granddaughters, you can read, learn, and enjoy a small bit at a time about your favorite subject, spiders!

          Catching interest is also key as Leslie opens with an overall poem titled with the scientific name, "Araneae All Around", a four stanza piece that amazingly covers everything, from where ("From leafy covers to forest floor,/Where foam-kissed ocean meets shimmery shore," and on) to hatching and bodies and what these eight-legged predators do! Each poem oozes with appreciation for spiders while including apt information. With creativity, Leslie offers a variety of poems, free-verse and patterned forms, adding a page of explanation for the poems in the back. One spider I have known of but wonder how many others will be surprised about is the "Diving Bell Spider" haiku described: "scuba spider/wears a silver bubble/dines in". 

          Each page includes text, a poem or more, and an illustration or more when spiders need to be grouped together. Here are a few samples:

         Helpful pages that highlight content are: a Table of Contents, a Glossary, Poetic Forms, Spi-ku spider identification for the pages, a 'how-to' for a "Spider Hunt", resources for further study, acknowledgments, a double-page spread of the book's spiders and their relative size compared to a pencil, and a page about the cover spiders. Information flows well, is entertaining in both text and poetry as it gives lots and lots (and lots) of information!

Other stops on this blog tour:

                Monday (4/5): Picture Books 4 Learning

                Tuesday (4/6): Storymamas

                Wednesday (4/7): The Miss Rumphius Effect

                Thursday (4/8): Reading to the Core

                Friday (4/9): TeacherDance

                Teacher’s guide: https://peachtree-online.com/pdfs/TeachersGuides/SpikuTG.pdf

If you'd like to follow. . .

Leslie Bulion social handles:

Facebook: @leslie.bulion

Twitter: @LeslieBulion

Instagram: @lesliebulion

 

Robert Meganck social handles:

Facebook: @rmeganck

Twitter: @r2meganck

Instagram: @r2meganck

 

Peachtree social handles:

Facebook: @PeachtreePub

Twitter: @PeachtreePub

Instagram: @peachtreepublishing

Extra Fun: Leslie reads one poem from her book at Michelle Schaub's Poetry Boost: 

          

 

          Thanks to Leslie Bulion, Robert Meganck, and Peachtree Publishing for a wonderful book and the opportunity to share it!