Focus Titles: Love That Dog & Hate That Cat

Wooo Hooo! The sequel to Love That Dog, entitled Hate That Cat, was published last month. Nick, one of my students, found it online and shared the exciting news with our class. Of course I put the book on hold at the public library, read it aloud to my reading classes, lent it to a teacher friend, and went to Barnes & Noble to buy my own first edition.

Thanks, Nick!

In case you're wondering what all the hoopla is about, I'll tell you. Every year we read Love That Dog by Sharon Creech as an introduction to poetry. A couple of years ago I bought a class set of books from Scholastic Book Clubs so all of my students could share in the experience. Love That Dog is a short novel written in the form of a communication journal between Jack, a fourth-grader, and his teacher Miss Stretchberry. Jacks journal entries are written in free verse form and chronicle his awakening to reading and writing poetry. You can read the book straight through in less than an hour, including discussion time. I always begin by reading the poems used by Miss Stretchberry in the appendix at the back of the book. This way my students are familiar with the poems Jack mentions in his journal entries. My class especially enjoys the Robert Frost poems "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Pasture." Another popular poem is an excerpted stanza from the poem "Love That Boy" by Walter Dean Myers. The full poem is published in his book Brown Angels. Prolific young adult writer and poet Walter Dean Myers even makes a guest appearance in the story.

After reading Love That Dog, my students choose a poem from the appendix to memorize and perform for our class audience. Then we start writing poems of our own beginning with couplets, then quatrains, and free verse. Sharon Creech's web site is a great resource for readers and teachers alike. Interested teachers may want to download a free special teaching guide for Love That Dog and Hate That Cat.

Sharon Creech

http://www.sharoncreech.com/

Walter Dean Myers
http://www.walterdeanmyers.net/

Focus Title: Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle

Some of you may remember Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle, the popular anthology of modern verse from the 1960s (original cover shown below). The second edition has been updated and revised, and we have been reading it for several weeks now. This collection of poetry contains some of the best and most familiar modern poems in print, and each section has an unwritten theme we try to decipher. We will continue to read through this volume in small doses into the new year, and students will be selecting a new poem from this collection to memorize.

The first poem all students memorized this year was "The Eagle" by Tennyson. The poem was used in the the novel Prairie Songs by Pam Conrad, AM class's first focus title of the year.

The Eagle: A Fragment

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Later, when we read Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, students selected one of the featured poems in the book to memorize. The favorites were "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening" and "The Pasture" by Robert Frost, as well as "Dog" by Valerie Worth.