Pocketful of Poems

Grimes, N. (2001). Pocketful of Poems. Illus. Javaka Steptoe. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Annotation: This is a poetry book that uses a lot of one verse and Haiku in it. The illustrator uses a lot of cut outs and objects we would find as "junk" so to speak to create the illustrations. The illustrations almost seem 3D to me.

Genre: Children's poetry

Grade Level: K-5

Readers who would like this: This would be a nice book for a teacher to keep for a poetry unit. It gives the student a different view of what poetry can look like besides typed plain text in a book.

Ratings/Response: I give this book a 3. I think the illustrations are unique and I like that the author uses real-life things to create poetry out of.

Question: Have you ever written a poem before?

Reading Strategy:
a) Tompkins #21 (interactive writing)
b) This is a classroom activity where students and take turns writing text onto large paper that the teacher has at the front of the class. They add punctuation and correct errors as each student takes turns adding what they know about punctuation and word choice.
c) This would match very well with this book, because the students can create a classroom poem of their own. Each student gets the opportunity to add their creativity to the poem and help students out with grammatical and punctuation errors. The class can decide as a group what the topic of the poem is going to be and the teacher can start the poem off for the class.