Visit Jen at Teach MentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders to see what they've been reading, along with everyone else who link up.
Be sure to go here to Irene Latham's post at Live Your Poem for line number seventeen of her own creation, the April Progressive Poem.
I've been writing a poem most days, but this time want to share an extraordinary verse novel just out last week, and other recent books who deserve the description, poetic. All wonderful books to read and love!
The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary - Laura Shovan
I do love verse novels,
and in the past few years, numerous ones have been published that have touched
me, made me laugh or cry, entertained and inspired. I’ve waited a long time for
this particular one by Laura Shovan because she is a blogger and poet friend
and I knew when she announced the book was going to be published, was coming
out, when the party was, and knew I would love it. I didn’t teach fifth grade,
but 6th, 7th &
8th
graders for a lot of years, and Laura has shown these “ready-to-be” adolescents
in perfect ways. They still play, a little; they want to “like” another, and be
“liked” by someone, but not too closely; and perhaps most of all, they want to
be listened to.
Emerson Elementary is going to be torn down at the end of the year, and this
fifth grade teacher, Ms. Hill, has asked her students to write a poem each
quarter reflecting on the change and on their personal lives. The poems will be
placed in a time capsule, opened in twenty-five years. Laura moves the reader
through the year, a quarter at a time, introducing each student through his or
her poems, with a tiny label and snapshot pic at the top of the page. It helps,
because it’s hard to know the students at first, except stereotypically: the
girl who bosses her friends, the boy who is new, the boy whose father had left
the family, the girl who wears a hijab and on. But Laura’s trick is to show so
much of each student within the poem, one soon begins to think, “Oh, that’s the
one who’s bossy, maybe needy, and now she’s lost a friend.” or “How sad that he
believes he doesn’t have anyone to talk with.” One early line I love is
when Katie complains about writing time again! She writes, “My words are
still/crawling out of bed.” And a girl named Sydney with a twin (but not
in all things) talks about her own clothes on picture day, that she hates
skirts. “It feels weird when I walk.” The poem shows beautifully how everyone
feels on picture day choices: “I thought a purple shirt would be okay,/but I
look like an exploding grape soda/or a purple blob.” Another feels more
comfortable writing her poems in Spanish, and classmates help her translate
them into English.
As I read, I began to know the students,
just as a teacher begins to “know” her own students when the year moves from
quarter to quarter. The thread that binds the story is the hope of these fifth
graders, the last ones at Emerson Elementary, who realize that like their
teacher who has participated in sit-ins, fighting for her own cause, they too
can join together to try to stop the demolition of their school. Certain
students take the lead, and the class begins to see that words and actions
matter-even from fifth graders.