April is Poetry Month....But Poetry Can be Read All Year!

I'm not that keen on identifying April as Poetry Month. Perhaps it is because I was raised by a poet, but I think Poetry can be enjoyed all the year through. The official title of Poetry Month does let us give it some special focus though.

Many of the staff has been enjoying daily poems by a wide variety of children's poets, thanks to this wonderful blog- GottaBook. Take a peek at all the poems from the month. I think the poem from Earth Day (April 22) would be a powerful poem to read with your child.

4th Graders experienced listening to a story by focusing on the 5 senses. As I read Dogteam by Gary Paulsen, the students kept a list of the parts of the story they could imagine tasting, smelling, touching, seeing and hearing.

3rd Graders learned about Haiku- the importance of nature and a surprise or a twist- and then had the chance to author their own poems. We also enjoyed reading aloud poems of apology and forgiveness from the book, This is Just to Say: poems of apology and forgiveness by Joyce Sidman.

1st graders were able to enjoy poems animated and performed by such fabulous readers as Susan Sarandon, Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes thanks to a DVD purchased for our library by the District, The Poetry Show: I'm Grown Up Now.

There are four days left in April. Read a poem today!

Bennett Book Club May 5th!

The Bennett Book Club will be meeting for our final (sniff, sniff) meeting of the year on May 5th. For this meeting students were given the choice of three, yes, three books to choose from:

Kensuke's Kingdom, Escaping the Giant Wave, and Robin's Country.

These books were recommended by other librarian's in the school district as great book club books. Mr. Drugge and I are looking forward to three wonderful conversations. Now we just have to figure out how to triplicate ourselves, so we don't miss any of the conversations.

If you'll be in 4th or 5th grade next year, keep a look out in September for the invitation to join the Bennett Book Club. We'll be reading through American History.

I'm Back!

Thank you voters! Thanks to the Technology Levy, I now have a laptop computer that is working and can access this blog. For the last month, my old laptop computer was dying a slow ugly death. Now that I have my new and functioning computer, I can let you know what we've been up to in the Bennett Library.