Happy National Children's Book Week

I must admit I never thought about sharing poetry with my students for Children’s Book Week. Children’s Book Week is this week, November 12th to the 18th. But this is the last year we will be celebrating it in November, at the start of the school year. The Children’s Book Council has been celebrating Children’s Book Week since 1919. Since I became a librarian, I have looked forward to that special time in November when I can celebrate reading with my students with special book marks, a special display of their favorite reads, based on checkout figures from the previous year. However, I have noticed that American Education Week overshadows Children’s Book Week celebrations. Perhaps the Children’s Book Council noticed too because they are changing the celebration of Children’s Book Week to the month of May. So in 2008 we will celebrate Children’s Book Week from 12th-18th of May. That means this school year we will have two Children’s Book Week Celebrations and I could not be happier. We already have a great buy one, get one free book fair scheduled for that week in May and I hope the celebration will always happen during my May book fair. What a better way to celebrate Children’s Book Week than a book fair that gets summer reading materials into kids hands and doesn’t break parents banks? I am very excited that we will be celebrating Children’s Book Week in such a special way in 2008 and I hope it falls the same week as my book fair from now on… wouldn’t that be great?
Now, back to poetry. In the November 2007 Book Links Magazine, Sylvia Vardell has started a new column called Everyday Poetry. In the article Vardell says that Children’s Book Week is a good time to introduce children to poems about reading. Duh… why didn’t I think of that? Of course I always shared school poems but never thought of finding specific poems about reading. So, now I have a lot of work to do searching through my poetry books to find some about reading. This is actually a good thing since the 5th graders are starting looking at alliteration tomorrow. A few poems about reading may be just the ticket to enrich the lesson!
I like Vardell’s idea of using choral poetry reading too, the 5th grade teachers would like to get into podcasting. Choral reading of poetry may be just the ticket to getting the students a little bit of practice behind the microphone before they start their class projects.
I found this on teachertube.com:



We wrote Haiku for 3 weeks getting ready for our video-conference with author/poet Mary Quattlebaum, I think my students are ready to do something like the video above. Can't wait to try it! :-)