Earth Day, Bugs, and Poetry

It is still National Poetry Month, so I have been using every opportunity to share a poem with anyone who walks into the library. (I still plan on doing this after April, of course!)

With my kindergarten classes, the opportunity came via their curriculum. The classes had been studying insects, so I immediately thought of several bug poetry books including Bug Off! Creepy Crawly Poems (Wordsong, 2012).

In this poetry picture book, Yolen writes poems about insects and accompanies each poem with a nonfiction paragraph as well as a close-up photograph by Jason Stemple. Before reading the poem I'd selected, I did a picture walk with the book. My students called out the name of each insect or shared with a partner what they knew about it. I heard lots of "Wow" and "Eww!"

I had chosen "Grasshopper Green", a poem about yes, a grasshopper,  because I loved how it sounded as I read it aloud to myself. It consists of two stanzas with four lines each, and the last line of each stanza is "Green, green, green". 

I displayed the poem on chart paper, and read it aloud twice. On the third reading, students repeated the last line with me saying "Green, green, green". It sounded lovely! 

With my 2nd graders, I knew they'd been studying Earth Day and that they had taken a nature walk the day before. Although their library day was the day AFTER Earth Day, I chose to continue the celebration! 

I showed a picture of Earth, and then had the students tell me all about their nature walk the day before. I then read a poem aloud especially written for Earth Day by Mary Lee Hahn. The poem is entitled "Earth, You Are" and it is a short, two verse poem in which the narrator talks to the Earth. 

I found this poem in the book Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations (Pomelo Books, 2015) compiled by Dr. Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong. 

Following the suggested plan for the poem in the book, I read the poem twice. On the second reading, my students read aloud the first three words of each of the first lines in the stanza: "Earth, you are ...."

After, I had students share what they would do to celebrate/protect the earth that very day. The answers ranged from recycling trash, to going paperless. Others said they'd plant a seed! 

Some students chose to illustrate the poem or draw Earth afterward: 

These activities were relatively simple and still allowed for checkout time. It's no surprise that many of the books I'd pulled on recycling, Earth Day, and gardening were quickly checked out. 

What I loved about both of these "poetry breaks" was that they were quick and did not involve a lot of preparation (other than reading the poetry beforehand which was awesome).  But they did add a lot of joy to the day, and together in that library, my students and teachers and I shared a wonderful literary moment -- the kind of moment that will live in my librarian heart forever.