Author and educator Sylvia Vardell has just announced some exciting news on her blog Poetry for Children!  She and her friend/author Janet Wong have collaborated on another wonderful project:  The Poetry Friday Anthology.

The Poetry Friday Anthology is a new anthology of 218 original poems for children in kindergarten through fifth grade by 75 popular poets including J. Patrick Lewis, Jack Prelutsky, Jane Yolen, Margarita Engle, X. J. Kennedy, Kathi Appelt, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, Georgia Heard and Nikki Grimes and many more.

The book includes a poem a week for the whole school year (K-5) with curriculum connections provided for each poem, each week, each grade level. Just five minutes every “Poetry Friday” will reinforce key skills in reading and language arts such as rhyme, repetition, rhythm, alliteration, etc.

Thanks to the lovely blog world of the “kidlitosphere,” I’ve been a fan of “Poetry Friday” since the beginning (in 2006). The idea of pausing for poetry every Friday is so appealing to me, maybe because Friday has always been my favorite day of the week. I think it is a natural fit for busy teachers and librarians who can build on that Poetry Friday tradition by incorporating a weekly poetry break into their regular routines. That’s the first “hook” in our book– the idea of sharing a poem every Friday! (More often is even better, but Friday is the hook!)

The other hook is the call for connecting with the new Common Core standards (and in Texas where the Common Core was not adopted– don’t get me started– connecting with the TEKS, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). We’ve always had curricular standards of one kind or another, but poetry hasn’t always been an explicit component. It is now! Of course this worries me a bit as poetry may also be abused and butchered in the name of test preparation. But the challenge is to provide guidance in sharing poetry that respects the integrity of the poem, celebrating the pleasures of language, while reinforcing the necessary skills. That’s the second book “hook”– we’ve tied every poem in The Poetry Friday Anthology to the Common Core standards (and TEKS standards in Texas) for poetry.

This book is first and foremost a quality anthology of 218 original poems for children written by 75 of today’s most popular poets. Children in any state (or country) can enjoy, explore, and respond to these poems. However, we have also come to realize that educators, librarians, and parents are looking for guidance in how to share poetry with children and teach the skills within the curriculum as well. Thus, this book offers both. It’s part poetry collection and part professional resource guide– quality poetry plus curriculum-based suggestions for helping children enjoy and understand poetry more deeply.

You’ll find more information about the book at the PoetryFridayAnthology blog here. Our official launch date is Sept. 1 when we hope to offer an e-book version of the book as well– projectable and searchable! But the print version of the book is available NOW to help jumpstart the school year with poetry. I’ll also be posting a few nuggets from the book here in the near future– as well as more about our new joint publishing venture, Pomelo Books.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Dori Reads so head on over and see what treasures are in store.

The 2nd Children’s Poetry Festival was celebrated in El Salvador, November 16 – 18, 2011. Talleres de Poesia hosted the event at the National Library in San Salvador where a number off well-known poets including Jorge Tetl Argueta, Francisco X. Alarcon,  Maria Guadalupe Castellanos, Jorgelina Cerritos and Manlio Argueta worked with Salvadoran children, youth and teachers in a blend of poetry readings and workshop presentations. The  theme of the workshops this year was the importance of reading and significance of peace for Salvadoran children and youth. The event was a resounding success; check out the smiles on the participants’ faces and the video of the event.

Edited by Debjani Chatterjee and Brian D’Arcy, illustrated by Shirin Adl,
Let’s Celebrate! Festival Poems from Around the World
Frances Lincoln, 2011.

Ages 5-11

Let’s Celebrate is an effervescent anthology of diverse poetry put together by poets Debjani Chatterjee and Brian D’Arcy. It invites young readers to share in the exuberance of a wide array of festivals celebrated around the world. Starting with “The Chinese Dragon” bringing in the Chinese New Year, ending with “Kwanzaa” in December, and visiting different cultures, countries and religions in between, the book takes children on a journey whose unifying thread is the happiness that each of the festivals awakens. Children will likely find poems relating to festivals that are familiar to them, and their curiosity will be aroused to find out about the rest. Endnotes about each festival give relevant background; and again, children may want to know more after reading them.

The poems themselves come in a variety of forms – some with regular patterns of rhyme and meter, others in free verse. There are choruses that just have to be chanted aloud, like “Carnival! Carnival! Everybody shout out – Carnival!” in Valerie Bloom’s wonderful poem “Carnival”. There are also translations, like the selection of Japanese “Cherry Blossom” haiku; “Dance, Dance: A Poem for Rangali Bihu” from Assam; and extracts from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Tomatoes”, used to commemorate the Spanish Tomatina Festival. Illustrator Shirin Adl’s exuberant splashes of red paint certainly get the message across here!

In fact, the illustrations are a joy throughout. Adl uses an effective blend of painting and paper/fabric/photographic collage (I especially love the seeds, pulses and herbs illustrating Chatterjee’s acrostic “Diwali”). Plenty of authentic contextual detail helps to bring the celebrating to life, and lots of happy children and their families are an open-armed invitation for young readers to join in the celebrations too, whether it’s helping to scrape pancakes off the ceiling while “Tossing Pancakes” (by Nick Toczek), running to “get your skates on” for the “Ice Festival” (by D’Arcy), or counting out the significance of each candle for “Hannukah” (by Andrea Shavick).

So yes, let us indeed celebrate – you can’t help but be caught up in the joyous spirit of this anthology. And with every day being a festival somewhere in the world, as Chatterjee and D’Arcy point out in their introduction, if there isn’t a poem for their particular festive day (or indeed, even if there is), Let’s Celebrate! will doubtless inspire young readers to compose one of their own.

Marjorie Coughlan
November 2011

If you want something for young children that’s full of zing and just a little bit different on the poetry front, then Anything But A Grabooberry is exactly what you’re looking for! First published by the wonderful Tara Books in 1998, it still feels as innovative as it was then.

Anushka Ravishankar’s nonsense poem that fills the book is based on the premise that I’d rather be anything else apart from a Grabooberry… The examples that make up that “anything else” will have young readers laughing aloud, as well as letting imaginations fly with what the dreadful grabooberry might be. And Rathna Ramanathan has incorporated the words into the book’s design, creating a visual treat in red and green through her exuberant combination of the words’ meanings and physical appearance.

As you read, you find yourself having to slow down over each page to savour the design. This in turn encourages deeper pondering of the meaning – thereby intensifying the enjoyment of reading nonsense! Choosing favorite bits is difficult, but here goes:

i want to be an elephant or a packing trunk

- I love the juxtaposition of elephant and trunk, and you can see these pages on this post from a Japanese blog, which also reproduces the book’s blurb in English;

i think i’d like to be sneeze
flying through the sky

- where “sneeze” and “flying” fizz across the pages and some of the letters are spun at angles – the “i” in “flying” becoming, appropriately enough, an exclamation mark; and

the sun, the moon or sixteen stars
any planet, even ours

Anything But A Grabooberry is perfect for getting children chuckling aloud, and both they and the adults they share it with will appreciate the book’s visual wit and sophistication. Do read this article by Rathna Ramanathan for some fascinating insight into the book’s creation – I especially liked what she said about children’s feedback on early drafts, and Gita Wolf’s comments:

I tested the pages out on several friends’ kids – their reading aloud of the typographic text on the page was an invaluable input. It gave the bee many more ‘e’s, and the grabooberry more ‘ooo’s… [...] As Gita Wolf, publisher at Tara Books explains, ‘We found that children enjoy figuring out words like puzzles, since they have no pre-conceptions about this. Adults are not necessarily faster at comprehending it.’

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Tabitha Yeatts: The Opposite of Indifference – head on over…

National Poetry Month is held every April in Canada and the USA to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American and Canadian culture. Schools, literary organizations, communities, businesses and more celebrate National Poetry Month with a plethora of events including poetry readings, festivals, book displays, and workshops. The kidlitosphere is sure to be active with bloggers celebrating the month – and one blog that you definitely don’t want to miss out reading is Sylvia Vardell’s Poetry for Children!

Sylvia is a professor of children’s and young adult literature at Texas Woman’s University, author of Poetry Aloud Here! Sharing Poetry with Children in the Library (ALA Editions, 2006), Poetry People: A Practical Guide to Children’s Poets (Libraries Unlimited, 2007), and Children’s Literature in Action: A Librarian’s Guide (Libraries Unlimited, 2008). She is co-editor of Bookbird, the journal of international children’s literature, co-editor of the annual review guide Librarians Choices and is also the poetry columnist for the American Library Association’s Book Links magazine.

Our April 2008 PaperTigers’ Poetry issue featured a reprint of Sylvia’s article Pairing Poems Across Cultures (which offered insights on the similarities and differences in poetry from parallel cultures) as well as a reprint of an interview that Cynthia Leitich Smith did with Sylvia in 2007. In 2010 we were thrilled to meet up with Sylvia at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and had a great chat with her.

Last April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, Sylvia played a game of Poetry Tag on her blog. Poets shared original poems, tagged another poet who shared a poem connected with the previous poem, and on and on. It was such a success that it led her and author Janet S. Wong to compile an anthology of 30 e-poems by 30 e-poets called PoetryTagTime.  This first ever electronic-only poetry anthology for children has new poems by many top poets writing for young people, and can be purchased for 99 cents here.

For this year’s National Poetry Month celebrations Sylvia says :

I’m sticking with my “tag” theme this year, too, as we pause to promote poetry far and wide. However, this time, I’m featuring reviews of poetry books out this year (2011), connected in that same “tag” fashion, from one to another. Plus, I’ve involved my students enrolled in my graduate course in poetry for children as guest reviewers. Some of them even tried creating digital trailers for their selected books. So, here we go: one review a day for the next 30 days, your mini intro to the latest poetry for young people.

So head on over to Poetry for Children and join in the celebrations!

A couple of days ago I wrote a post about Mongolian writer and literacy advocate Dasdondog Jamba. Although at first glance his blog may seem unfathomable to those of us who don’t understand Mongolian, hooray – we are in luck! He does have one category devoted to his poems in English.

Here’s the beginning of a lovely children’s poem, evocative of the Mongolian Steppe and with a whiff of the promise of spring:

Five Colors

“Lambs, lambs, how come
you’re pure white?”
“We were born when the snow had fallen,
so we have to be pure white”

“Little goats, little goats…” Read the rest of the poem here.

Do enjoy a read of these joyous poems – and they’d make a great classroom resource too. Also, take a look at this reprint from IBBY’s Bookbird journal, With the Mobile Library Through the Seasons, in which Dashdondog charts one of his amazing journeys with the Mongolian Mobile Children’s Library.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Liz In Ink – head on over…

Last November in San Salvador, El Salvador, Talleres de Poesia hosted the hugely successful First Children’s Poetry Festival. Award winning Salvadorian poet and children’s book author Jorge Tetl Argueta (who now resides in San Francisco, CA, USA) co-organized the event with Manlio Argueta, Director of the National Library of El Salvador, and two committees of volunteers from the San Francisco and San Salvador areas. The festival featured a number of well-known poets including Francisco X. Alarcon, Margarita Robleda, and Rene Colato Lainez who, for three days, participated in this unique and wonderful event giving the Salvadoran children, youth and teachers a blend of poetry readings and workshop presentations. Stay tuned as event organizers hope to make the Children’s Poetry Festival in El Salvador an annual event.

An exciting event is being planned in San Salvador this coming November and celebrated Salvadorian poet and children’s author Jorge Argueta has kindly sent us the following details:

From November 8 -10, Talleres de Poesia and the National Library of El Salvador will be presenting the 1st Annual Children’s Poetry Festival at the National Library in San Salvador.

The theme of the festival will be the importance of reading and significance of peace for Salvadoran children and youth. Renowned poets will be conducting writing workshops to Salvadoran children and youth. Attendees will  also have the opportunity to enhance their writing skills and learn techniques on how to write their experiences through poetry. Confirmed poets include Jorge as well as Francisco X. Alarcon, Margarita Robleda, Rene Colato Lainez, Ana Ferrufino, Jackie Mendez, and Jeannette “Lil Milagro” Martinez-Cornejo

Jorge is co-organizing this wonderful project with Manlio Argueta, Director of the National Library of El Salvador, and two committees of volunteers from the San Francisco, USA and San Salvador areas. When I asked Jorge how the idea  for a children’s poetry festival in El Salvador came about, he replied:

I’ve been coming frequently to El Salvador for the last 2 years…I began to do school presentations as well as adult poetry readings where I had the opportunity to meet teachers, librarians and other writers. Having worked many Poetry Festivals in the USA, it occurred to me that a festival would be a positive, creative opportunity for the children in El Salvador. It is also my way to contribute back to my country. I was thrilled when many of my old and new friends supported this idea and project.

Producing a children’s poetry festival in El Salvador  has always been in my heart and mind. I grew up without books in El Salvador, however I always understood the beauty and the great success that comes from reading. Today, unfortunately there is a lot of violence in El Salvador – our hopes are that this festival will give children and young adults the opportunity to express themselves creatively on the issue of living in peace and their dreams for a positive future.

As you can imagine this is a huge undertaking and organizers are asking for help in making this event a success. Donations are greatly appreciated and can be made directly to:

Talleres de Poesia
Account # 0006696
Mission Federal Credit Union
3269 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA, USA 94110

or you can mail a check to:
Talleres de Poesia
90 Bepler St.
Daly City, CA, USA 94014

Fundraising events are underway in cities throughout the USA and well-known artists and children’s book authors have donated some amazing items to be used to raise funds.

For more information you can e-mail  talleresdepoesia(a)yahoo(dot)com or “friend” Talleres de Poesia on Facebook!

What a lovely name for an anthology of poetry – Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures (Hodder Children’s Books, 2003). Edited by Bashabi Fraser and Debjani Chatterjee, and illustrated by Kelly Waldek, it brings together more than 80 poets, focusing “on the voices of Black and Asian poets from Britain, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and the continents of Asia and Africa”. The poems are divided into different sections – I’ve chosen extracts today from poems in the first and last “chapters” – firstly, from ‘Who’s Who – race, culture and identity’, part of the poem “a ‘coloured’ girl, I sleep with rainbows” by Lucinda Roy:

I am black. I am white.
I am the colour of the sun at noon.
I breathe with the sea.

For coloured girls who sleep with rainbows
there is light in the spittle of strangers.
My father, as black as brown can be;
my mother as white as the half-moons in his nails.
I am their tangible kiss.

And, from ‘The Last Word – peace and harmony’, part of a poem called “The Unknown You Have Made Known to Me” by Rabindranath Tagore from India, translated by Debjani Chatterjee:

I fear to leave a place I know of old,
Who knows what the future will unfold?
I forget the simple truth that within
The new, you are the familiar.
You have brought the distance near, my friend,
And made a brother of the stranger.

To read the rest of these poems, get hold of this superb anthology – mine came from my local library. It’s chockablock with poems that are soul-searching, identity-searching, thought-provoking, whimsical, catchy and just plain fun.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Laura Salas over at Writing the World for Kids. Head on over…

Award-winning poet Lara Saguisag introduces her Personal View, written for PaperTigers last year, with the rather unpromising line:

I must confess: as a child I didn’t like poetry very much.

That perception might have continued had she not been blown away by listening to poet Valerie Bloom – read Lara’s article, where she muses on this transformation and “The Many Possibilities of Children’s Poetry“.

I have yet to lay my hands on a copy of Lara’s Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People (Anvil, 2007) so instead, as we in the north of England move towards sharp, chilly mornings, I direct you to the poem “Frost” by Valerie Bloom – and make sure you listen to Valerie’s own exquisite reading of it too. It’s taken from Valerie’s The World is Sweet (Bloomsbury, 2001).

This week’s Poetry Friday round-up is taking place at Big A little a…