Celebrate Poetry All Month Long with Read, Discuss, Do

  Happy National Poetry Month! We are celebrating National Poetry Month with a weekly poetry challenge all month long. To follow along, subscribe to our newsletter or check back here every Monday and Friday throughout the month of April for updates.  Kickoff: Books and resources for National Poetry Month   Week one: Read and write haiku  Article: A Brief History of Poetry by Marci Whitehurst Week two: Read and write odes Article: Eight Creative Ways to Explore Poetry All Year Long by Rebecca J. Gomez Week three: Read and write riddle poems   If you and/or your children/students participate in any of our challenges this month, we'd love to hear from you.  You can  email  us or  tag us  on Instagram (use the hashtag #RDDPoetryChallenge or #RDDPoetryMonth). We will be sharing some readers’ poems in a round-up post at the end of the month, so if you’d like your poems to be considered, please let us know when you send them.

National Poetry Month Celebration: List Poems

 

Read, Discuss, Do! is celebrating list poems this week! List poems are exactly what they sound like -- poems written as lists! A list poem can be a list of anything real or imagined. They can be lists of people or places, ideas, things, actions, even emotions. Many list poems are silly. Many of them rhyme. But they can cover all sorts of topics and themes, and rhyming is completely optional. We hope that you will read some examples of list poems this week and try writing one or two of your own.

It's Raining Pigs and Noodles by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by James Stevenson, isn't specifically a book of list poems, but it's got some great examples of list poems in it. And the title poem is a silly, rhyming list poem that you'll be sure to enjoy.

Underneath My Bed: List Poems by Brian P. Cleary, illustrated by Richard Watson. This book is all about list poems! What they are, how to write them, and a lot of fun ones to read as examples. 

Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems, edited by Georgia Heard. This is a diverse mix of list poems of all sorts of topics by a bunch of different poets.

Example of a list poem:

"Sick" by Shel Silverstein

"I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
"I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye.

Read the whole poem on poets.org. 

For more on writing list poems, see this post on poetry4kids.com








Comments

Julia said…
I love Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout by Shel Silverstein!