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If you are a teacher, librarian, or other adult who uses children’s poetry as an educational tool, Poetry Aloud Here 2: Sharing Poetry with Children by Sylvia M. Vardell is a book you need to know about. This outstanding resource provides educators with tons of practical information on teaching poetry in both formal and informal settings, including including how and why to promote poetry to children, strategies for presenting poetry to kids, what kinds of poems children enjoy, biographies of many important children’s poets, follow-up activities, web resources, and so much more.

This revamped and expanded edition of the original Poetry Aloud Here! details best practices gleaned from years in the field, with numerous suggestions that cross the curriculum from literature to science and math, and includes expanded lists of poems, in-depth poet profiles, book-poetry pairings, and other tools useful for programming and collection development.

About the Author

Sylvia M. Vardell is currently Professor at Texas Woman s University in the School of Library and Information Studies, where she teaches graduate courses in children s and young adult literature. She has published articles in Book Links, Language Arts, English Journal, The Reading Teacher, The New Advocate, Young Children, Social Education, and Horn Book, as well as several chapters and books on language and literature. A presenter at many state, regional, national, and international conferences, Vardell organizes the “Poetry Round Up” session at the Texas Library Association conference. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1983.

Where to Buy this Book

The following is a guest post written by Karen L. Kilcup, Professor of English, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Angela Sorby, Associate Professor of English, Marquette University. I’m very excited about this new anthology published by Johns Hopkins University Press, so I thought I’d let them tell you about it in their own words.

Who could resist a poem that opens like this:

Have Angleworms attractive homes?
Do Bumble-bees have brains?
Do Caterpillars carry combs?
Do Ducks dismantle drains?

Charles E. Carryl’s “Memorandrums” typifies the animated, modern spirit of our new anthology, Over the River and Through the Wood. We began our project not only because we admire the writing—its ease, its playfulness, its innovation—but also because we realized how many nineteenth-century children’s poems are still vital to Americans—parents and grandparents as well as their children. From the title poem to “Mary’s Lamb” to “’Twas the night before Christmas” (“Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”), many of the verses in Over the River remain part of our collective consciousness, even if we can’t immediately identify the sources. I remember my own grandmother singing “Over the river and through the wood,” though she changed the second line: “To grandmother’s house we go.” Since she prepared the Thanksgiving turkey and mountains of vegetables and pies, I imagine that she felt just fine about this substitution. Our collection includes some other wonderful holiday poems, including one delicious ode to turkey dinner (Cooke’s “Turkey: A Thanksgiving Ode”) and a comic ballad from the bird’s perspective, “The Turkey’s Opinion.” Of course there’s far more to the anthology than holiday poems, but many of the most beloved, familiar pieces live in that section. Many of our poems offer major contributions to America’s literary tradition, including works by authors whom we don’t ordinarily associate with children, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sarah Piatt.

One children’s poem, “Mary’s Lamb” was actually the first sound recording ever made by Thomas Edison; you can listen to a scratchy, slightly later version by Edison here. Sarah Josepha Hale’s famous poem draws from a real story about a girl bringing her pet to the Redstone School, now in Sudbury, Massachusetts. You can visit the school from mid-May through mid-October. Read more…