Here are some great online resources for getting children interested in poetry.

Poetry4Kids

Giggle Poetry

Favorite Poem Project

Scholastic Poetry

Marvin Terban gets kids laughing (and learning) about language with these illustrated books of funny idioms.

Mad as a Wet Hen!

Punching the Clock

In a Pickle

True confession time: I'd never read Ernest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea until a couple of weeks ago, for this column. Yeesh, I know, I know, and I'm sorry. Walk away from this column if you must, convinced I'm not qualified to give you any advice for your ELA classroom. I wouldn't blame you. All I can say is that the high school I went to didn't have a cracker-jack curriculum, and, um, I hate fish. I really do. I have a phobia about all creatures of the sea, actually, and fish aren't even my most dreaded. Let's put it this way: if the book was titled The Old Man and the Squid, this column would be about a Jane Austen book.  Continue reading...

Here are some great online resources for getting children interested in poetry.

Poetry4Kids

Giggle Poetry

Favorite Poem Project

Scholastic Poetry

Here are some wonderful blogs about getting kids interested in literature.

The Well-Read Child

ShelfTalker

Scrub-a-Dub Tub

Kid Lit Kit

There's a little sticker reading "Sci-fi/Fantasy" on the cover of my library copy of Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting. Well. I guess this novel, about the inadvertently-immortal family the Tucks, and their run-in with the mortal human world, is a fantasy, but only in the same way Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables are fantasies. For my beloved little Tuck creates and populates a world — in this case, a small town in the 1880s called "Treegap" — just as surely as those classics do, without aliens, space travel or weird people in trench coats lurking around. I hate to see this gem of a novel get brushed off to a genre audience, for it has much to teach classrooms of young adults.  Continue reading...