Pinned

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Emily Post was the guardian of etiquette for decades, and now her descendents Peggy Post (Emily’s great-granddaughter-in-law) and Cindy P. Senning (Peggy’s sister-in-law) cover the genteel beat, making their book Emily’s Everyday Manners a tempting choice for teachers of manners. It is filled with practical advice about everyday situations that children encounter, such as playing on a playground, attending a birthday party, or riding the school bus. The book’s characters demonstrate good manners through sample phrases they might use in specific situations. Unfortunately the whole thing backfires because the words coming out of the kids’ mouths are so very unchildlike. For instance, while washing the dishes little Emily says to little Ethan, “Thanks! My mom so appreciates the help.” At best, these kids come across like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver; at worst, their adult-sounding comments would probably elicit real-life teasing from other children.

One old favorite to ease grownups and kids alike into the subject of manners is Sesyle Joslin’s classic What Do You Say, Dear?: A Book of Manners for All Occasions. The book, which adults may remember from their own childhoods, features delightfully imaginative and childlike scenarios such as this: “You are walking backwards, because sometimes you like to, and you bump into a crocodile. What do you say, dear?” A page turn reveals the answer: “Excuse me.” The accompanying illustrations by Maurice Sendak are very funny, with many of his characteristic touches (e.g., child characters wearing outsize dress-up clothes, a dog craning to lick a wedding cake). Not surprisingly, however, the book is of its time; the little girl plays at being a princess needing rescue, a bride, and other very traditional gender roles that may set off sexism alarm bells. Likewise, the firearm will probably rule it out for use in school, but the scenario makes its point perfectly: “You are a cowboy riding around the range. Suddenly Bad-Nose Bill comes up behind you with a gun. He says, ‘Would you like me to shoot a hole in your head?’ What do you say, dear? ‘No, thank you.’”

What Do You Say, Dear? works so beautifully as a manners book because it’s genuinely funny to both adults and children. It’s also participatory — the child is expected to fill in the answer before turning the page. The book doesn’t lecture children or put unrealistic-sounding words in their mouths. Rather, it gives kids practice with good-manners words so that they may, if backing into a crocodile (or a grandma) in the grocery store, spontaneously come up with the just right thing to say.

Another book an older generation might remember fondly is Munro Leaf’s Manners Can Be Fun. It begins by making the point that “good manners is really just getting along well with other people.” Updated several times since 1936 when originally published, it relies heavily on name-calling, describing children such as “BRAGGER” (“who tells you all the time how great he is”) and “SHOW-OFF” (“who is miserable if everybody isn’t paying attention to her”). The tone is very much that of an adult instructing a child—you can practically see the finger-wagging. The stick-figure illustrations are comical, but overall the book lacks the grace both in writing and illustration of Leaf’s classic Story of Ferdinand.

An entertaining book that melds old-fashioned sensibility with a modern-day twist is Diane Goode’s Mind Your Manners! The text comes from an 1802 spelling book designed to instruct children on etiquette. Still-useful tips include, “Throw not any thing under the table,” “Drink not, nor speak with any thing in thy mouth,” and “Eat not too fast, or with greedy behavior.” Rich watercolor and ink illustrations show the nineteenth-century Abbott family sitting at a long table — and breaking each of the book’s etiquette rules in turn. Goode skillfully conveys humor with a swoop of a line and a squiggle of black ink; readers who carefully pore over the pictures will be rewarded with lots of funny details. Interplay between the text’s heavy-handedness and the illustrations’ humor provides a great opportunity for discussing, with a light touch, current expectations for good manners.

Some books are fine stories on their own that also happen to cover manners. One is Cari Best’s Are You Going to Be Good?, about a little boy who tries his very hardest to be polite at his great-grandmother’s 100th birthday party. Young Robert rejoices in attending this most special occasion, looking very proud in his suit and tie, with newly polished shoes. He’s also all prepped with his manners: “In the car, they practice ‘Please.’ They practice ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Excuse me,’ too.” G. Brian Karas’s pictures hilariously convey both Robert’s ebullience (which would seem to present a challenge to all those expectations of behavior) and his sudden shyness at being faced with a roomful of tall, dressed-up adults. This isn’t a book about a perfect child but one who is trying hard, and in the end he and Great-Gran Sadie get into some welcome mischief. This book could be a wonderful way to prepare children for an important event, for it models not just child behavior but also compassionate, wise adult behavior (sometimes we need a little reminding, too).

Another picture book that is strong in its own right and happens to have some good pointers about manners is Thank You, Meiling, by Linda Talley. Little duck Meiling is behaving much in the way a spoiled human child would. Her mother reprimands her and sends her to run errands with a little boy: “You shall go with him. If you pay attention, you may learn something about courtesy. Remember, stop and think of others.” The duck takes her mission seriously, noticing each polite phrase or action as she and the boy gather items for the Moon Festival. The story is engaging, the Moon Festival traditions enticing, and the manners are clearly portrayed as being more than mere custom but rather a way of taking care of others.

Author Judy Sierra shows a particular affinity for picture books about manners. Her most recent, Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur: A First Book of Manners, depicts a little girl who goes to the grocery store and encounters a dinosaur. The pair copes with a number of etiquette questions, all posed in rhyme, as when the dinosaur wants to turn down an offer of butter brickle: “She does not want it, even slightly. / How does she let you know politely?” The question-and-answer format recalls What Do You Say, Dear? but with an updated look and tone. Tim Bowers’s illustrations portray the dinosaur with a tiny pink purse and glasses, watched by wary-looking humans as she shops. The book combines humor with instruction, as does Sierra’s Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf, in which a dapper-looking wolf heads off to a party at the library while trying to remember his instructions: “Sip your tea and never slurp, say ‘Excuse Me’ if you burp. / Smile and have a lot of fun, but don’t go biting anyone!” Fairy-tale characters populate J. Otto Seibold’s digital illustrations, and kids will enjoy finding the ones they know while they follow B.B. Wolf’s attempts at staying polite.

Since the reason for having good manners is to get along well with others, and each of Mo Willems’s books gets down to the fundamentals of the way people (and elephants, piggies, pigeons, ducklings, and others) relate to one another, it’s not surprising that he, too, has written some manners books. Time to Say “Please”! offers advice to a little girl who is eyeing a cookie jar so longingly that her eyes turn into cookies. The words of wisdom are presented by cute little mice, industriously using balloons, signs, parachutes, and other things to show the information: “Don’t just grab it! Go ask a big person and PLEASE say ‘PLEASE’!” The mice continue to list other reasons to say please, and some other useful phrases, too, all delivered with humor and practicality: “You may not get what you want. But it’s hard to say ‘no’ to ‘please.’”

Willems’s newest Pigeon book, The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? also features manners and cookies. Pigeon cannot believe that adorable little Duckling has somehow gotten hold of a cookie simply by asking for it. After Pigeon reels off the many things he himself requires, a tear drops from his eye: “But do I get what I ask for?” A double-page-spread Pigeon-tantrum ensues: “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” He is finally shamed into politeness by the duckling’s kind offer of the cookie. An adult looking for the perfect book to teach a rude child manners may prefer a protagonist without so much attitude, but children will get the point through Pigeon’s own bad behavior.

For those still on their way to Willems there are even some board books intended to teach manners to the very youngest. Manners Time, by Elizabeth Verdick, gives kids not just the words to say but the accompanying physical cues. In one example a little girl offers salad to her friend, and the text reads, “Here’s a nice way to say no: ‘No, thank you.’ (A smile helps, too.)” Changes in typeface help identify the message, with the spoken phrase printed in a different color. The illustrations by Marieka Heinlen show a diverse group of kids with a range of expressions that make meaning clear while not stooping to the cartoony or exaggerated. This book could be used with toddlers as well as with older kids who need some help with social cues, and it also includes some thoughtful tips for parents and caregivers.

Hello Genius, a new series of board books, offers bold graphic illustrations and one manners word or phrase at a time. Titles include Mouse Says “Sorry,” Hippo Says “Excuse Me,” and Bear Says “Thank You.” In Penguin Says “Please,” Penguin starts out being bratty, demanding things without saying the magic word. By the end he learns how to ask politely and is rewarded with the things he requests. It’s a simple lesson that’s useful to learn as early as possible.

There are several contemporary examples of books whose attempts to teach manners are heavy-handed and unwelcome (Whoopi’s Big Book of Manners, for instance, or the new Terrible, Awful, Horrible Manners!). The books that succeed in their mission are the ones that help children learn some of the nuances of polite behavior and are still great stories — entertaining, engaging, and authentic-sounding. One of the best manners books in recent years, combining all the elements of successful etiquette-teaching, is Jane Yolen’s hugely popular How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? The volume combines Mark Teague’s very funny illustrations showing human parents and their dinosaur children with Yolen’s impeccable rhymes. Children get enough distance from the moral that they can be caught by surprise when they recognize their own naughty actions; as a little girl in my story time once exclaimed, “Hey! Sometimes I do that!” They get the message; and because it is delivered with sly wit that is funny to both the child and the adult reader, it is a treat for all. And for that, we should all say, “Thank you!”

Good Manners Books

Are You Going to Be Good? (Farrar, 2005) by Cari Best; illus. by G. Brian Karas
Bear Says “Thank You” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Hippo Says “Excuse Me” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Mouse Says “Sorry” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Penguin Says “Please” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Mind Your Manners! (Farrar, 2005) by Diane Goode
What Do You Say, Dear?: A Book of Manners for All Occasions (Addison-Wesley, 1958) by Sesyle Joslin; illus. by Maurice Sendak
Manners Can Be Fun (Lippincott, 1936; Universe, 2004) by Munro Leaf
Emily’s Everyday Manners (Collins/HarperCollins, 2006) by Peggy Post and Cindy Post Senning; illus. by Steve Björkman
Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf (Knopf, 2007) by Judy Sierra; illus. by J. Otto Seibold
Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur: A First Book of Manners (Knopf, 2012) by Judy Sierra; illus. by Tim Bowers
Thank You, Meiling (MarshMedia, 1999) by Linda Talley; illus. by Itoko Maeno
Manners Time (Free Spirit, 2009) by Elizabeth Verdick; illus. by Marieka Heinlen
The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? (Hyperion, 2012) by Mo Willems
Time to Say “Please”! (Hyperion, 2005) by Mo Willems
How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? (Blue Sky/Scholastic, 2000) by Jane Yolen; illus. by Mark Teague

From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Every Thing on It
by Shel Silverstein; illus. by the author
Primary, Intermediate | Harper/HarperCollins | 202 pp.
9/11 | 978-0-06-199816-4 | $19.99 | Library ed. 978-0-06-199817-1 | $20.89

Posthumously published works are sometimes weak, but this collection of 140-plus poems is every bit as good as Silverstein’s earlier poetry collections, beginning with the now-classic Where the Sidewalk Ends (rev. 4/75). From the poem whose illustration graces the cover — in which a doleful-looking person holds a hotdog with everything on it, including “a parrot, / A bee in a bonnet,” and other items piled high — to a final poem that invites the reader to write his or her own, the book is not just laugh-out-loud funny but demands to be read aloud to any available parents, siblings, and friends. As always, the drawings add immeasurably to the entertainment and often provide the punch line, as in the poem about boots that are “a little too big,” shown in the picture as a pair of giant boots with just a tiny bit of a person’s head peeking out, capped by a very large cowboy hat. The poems’ style varies — the collection has its share of the slightly creepy, the slightly naughty, and the slightly gross (see “Mistake”) and also includes some poignant or thoughtful poems, such as one about a witch who can no longer remember how to cast spells. Silverstein’s most recent book was the amusing but fluffy Runny Babbit (rev. 5/05); this one, however, has depth, heart, and humor.

—Susan Dove Lempke

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who easily relinquish the eventually embarrassing relics of babyhood like blankies and pacifiers. Children, being by definition immature, instead pitch fits in restaurants, snatch toys away from guests, and push to the front of the line to go down the slide. They talk around a pacifier, and once they have put that aside, they interrupt and don’t seem to notice when adults tell them what to do.

Parents and preschool teachers—misguidedly—turn to picture books to solve these problems. They also look to books to teach their children important values. One parent at my library last week requested a book “to teach him that money doesn’t grow on trees and he can’t have everything he sees in the store.” As with the parent who asked for a book to teach about pouring water, it is sometimes hard not to say, “You don’t need a book for that.” (The huge number of books aimed at persuading children that reading is fun and books are good seems also a bit perverse—wouldn’t it be more persuasive to read excellent, engaging books in a loving environment?)

In one recent storytime I introduced the newly published Martha Doesn’t Share! by Samantha Berger. Several of the children announced with excitement, “I have that book!” or “I have that book at school!” Of course they did: parents and teachers love books about sharing. However, what librarians want to see is a picture book that meets the literary and artistic criteria for excellence—strong characters, an interesting story, some emotional depth. If it has a good point to make, that’s gravy. Joanna Cole’s Sharing Is Fun didactically shows a mother and son deciding which toys to share with company, and then holding to his agreement to share. It says “it’s fun to share with friends,” but it’s doubtful many children reading the stiff text will agree.

Fortunately, it’s possible to write a picture book that communicates the messages that parents and teachers want to convey while still creating picture books that librarians, children, and other lovers of good books want to see. In Martha Doesn’t Share! Berger creates in Martha a stubborn little personality, someone who struggles with the very real issue she faces when her family simply leaves her alone to play with the precious toys she doesn’t want to share. In the end, she shares a little, but it’s clearly still difficult for her, which we see through Bruce Whatley’s tender but hilarious pictures as Martha grudgingly gives her baby brother one of her mountain of blocks. It’s funny and truthful, and acknowledges that it’s hard to share—and it doesn’t pretend that once children share they will always be happy about it.

Another good book places a more positive spin on sharing. Mary Ann Hoberman’s One of Each celebrates both the joys of being alone with one of everything and the joys of sharing “One plum and one apple, one pear and one peach. / Just one, only one, simply one, one of each” with friends. The tension—which children feel strongly—between the pleasures of a more solitary life with everything just so and the satisfaction of being with friends is perfectly balanced. Poet Hoberman can pull off a story in rhyme where many writers fail, and artist Marjorie Priceman gives Oliver Tolliver, the main character, a jaunty flair in his clothes and his exquisite house.

Of course, since sharing is a fundamental issue among all humans, not just small children, folk tales touch on that topic, too. Jan Brett’s modern-day classic The Mitten shows animals squeezing into a mitten until at last a bear causes the mitten to explode. It’s a satisfying recognition that sharing only goes so far, and children appreciate both its humor and its suspense. Similarly, in the great story-hour book Mushroom in the Rain by Mirra Ginsburg, critters take shelter under a mushroom, but in this case the mushroom expands in an almost magical way.

Sharing a toy is hard; sharing your parents with a new sibling is even harder. New babies send parents looking for the right book to give big brother or sister the message that the new baby is a good thing. People who don’t know many children’s books often turn to the  comfortable, familiar Berenstain Bears books. In The Berenstain Bears’ New Baby, Small Bear has outgrown his bed. Fortuitously, while he and Papa Bear are building a new bed, Sister Bear makes her appearance in his old bed. The tone is utterly upbeat: “Being a big brother is going to be fun,” he says, as he lies in his new bed. The pictures have an endearing quality with some funny moments, but the writing is both flat and disrespectful toward a child’s genuinely mixed feelings at the birth of a new baby.

Kevin Henkes’s heroine Lilly handles her new little brother in a very different way in Julius, the Baby of the World. Her parents model the most loving behavior toward both baby Julius and Lilly, but Lilly is angry: “‘If he was a number, he would be zero. If he was a food, he would be a raisin. Zero is nothing. A raisin tastes like dirt. The End,’ said Lilly.” But when Cousin Garland criticizes Julius for exactly the same things Lilly has disparaged, the protective big sister emerges to defend her baby brother. The perfect pacing, characterization, and humor don’t obscure the deep feelings Henkes depicts with truth and insight, which is what a new big brother or sister needs more than bland reassurances.

Similarly, in That New Animal, Emily Jenkins uses a pair of dogs to express similar feelings of disgust toward a baby in the family, but FudgeFudge and Marshmallow spring into action when “the Grandpa” attempts to approach the baby. “It’s our animal,” they say. Pierre Pratt’s comical pictures of the two dogs with the round-headed baby are funny, but the feelings of neglect the older siblings/dogs feel are very real as the parents forget to pay attention to their animals for a while. Using dogs makes the message a little more accessible without being heavy-handed.

In Jeanne Birdsall’s Flora’s Very Windy Day, the whimsical tale of a younger brother floating away carries a lot of emotional truth about an older sibling’s mixed feelings toward a younger sibling. The final picture depicts them moving closer together over a plate of cookies, without text, showing that a message can be delivered with a very light touch.

A related message parents like to send their children through picture books is that giving up baby things is something to be happy about. They want children to delight in growing older and bigger. In I Used to Be the Baby by Robin Ballard, a big brother does all of the right things to help out with his baby brother. When the baby grabs his toys, he hands the baby a baby toy, and he sings songs in the car to distract him. It’s a little too instructional, requiring a very mature older sibling to carry them out, but the ending has a poignant, authentic note when he says, “I am the big brother. But sometimes I like to be the baby too.”

One way authors can send a parent-friendly message through a book is through poking a little fun at their own character, so that children laugh and then want to behave in the opposite way. It can be effective if carried out with cleverness, as with Mo Willems’s Pigeon books. A surefire storytime hit is David McPhail’s Pig Pig Grows Up, in which baby of the family Pig Pig refuses to surrender his baby things: “‘I want my baby clothes,’ he screamed. ‘I’m only a baby!’” McPhail’s ink-and-watercolor pictures depict Pig Pig in a tenderly comic way, and when Pig Pig saves a real baby from danger, children laugh out loud and cheer for the now more mature Pig Pig. It’s a funny book about a character, not a book written to deliver a message.

As frustrating as it may be to the children’s book community, many adults look at children’s books purely for their instructional value. As one children’s book cataloger commented, “I know I’ve seen lots of books over the years that probably fall in this category that were typeset in Comic Sans, with way too much text on each page, and illustrations that look like they were done by someone who has never actually done art for a living but is absolutely certain he knows what sort of pictures appeal to children.” These blatantly therapeutic books are easily spotted and avoided, but it’s important not to be satisfied with books with better production values and better writing that are still not good enough to be used in a story time. For it to be worth sharing, a picture book needs to be excellent in its own right, regardless of what it teaches.

—Susan Dove Lempke

Good Books about Sharing

I Used to Be the Baby (Greenwillow, 2002) by Robin Ballard

Martha Doesn’t Share! (Little, Brown, 2010) by Samantha Berger; illus. by Bruce Whatley

Flora’s Very Windy Day (Clarion, 2010) by Jeanne Birdsall; illus. by Matt Phelan

The Mitten (Putnam, 1989) by Jan Brett

Mushroom in the Rain (Macmillan, 1974) by Mirra Ginsburg; illus. by Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey

Julius, the Baby of the World (Greenwillow, 1990) by Kevin Henkes

One of Each (Little, Brown, 1997) by Mary Ann Hoberman; illus. by Marjorie Priceman

That New Animal (Foster/Farrar, 2005) by Emily Jenkins; illus. by Pierre Pratt

Pig Pig Grows Up (Dutton, 1980) by David McPhail

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Upon hearing such requests posed by education students and teachers, a librarian’s first thought might be, Do these poems even exist? Of course, the next thought might be, Why in the world would someone think poetry books about personal hygiene should exist? Are hand-washing and nail-clipping the stuff of which poetry is made? And what does it teach students about poetry to give them a poem about, say, the flu?

Wonderful poetry can, of course, be written on almost any subject. This haiku from Jack Prelutsky’s If Not for the Cat (Greenwillow) would fit with a unit on invertebrates and is a genuinely evocative poem that in seventeen syllables captures the essence of jellyfish:

The problem comes in when poets begin writing poetry to fit a particular subject in order to satisfy curriculum needs. Then it becomes purposeful poetry, where the poet’s intention isn’t self-expression or revelation or even merely observation. Instead, the poet intends to teach children something finite and factual.

In some ways, poetry for children has always been a strange beast. Poetry, more than other forms of writing, tends to be an intensely personal expression. No characters spark a story to life, and generally no plot dictates the form of the work (putting aside the narrative poem or free-verse novel). Instead, poems spring from experience and the desire to put feelings or thoughts into words, using meter and rhythm to further evoke the experience. Adults writing poetry for children is almost incongruous — adult lives are not children’s lives, and children aren’t very interested in adult experience. They might be willing to read poetry about how cool it is to drive a car, or how it feels to have power to make choices with money beyond which video game to buy. But the themes are limited, and most adult feelings that could be expressed in poetry would be of very little interest to a child audience.

So adult poets writing for the child audience must take a different path. They can draw from memories of their own childhood, trying to recapture, say, the joy of riding a bike or the fear of dark places. They can look at the lives of children today and try to write poems about that, resulting in poems that often are more mundane or aiming for the funny rather than the experiential — the school poetry of Kalli Dakos in The Goof Who Invented Homework (Dial) is an example. Or adult poets can try to write about areas of common interest between children and adults, like animals (which Douglas Florian has done very successfully, beginning with beast feast [Harcourt]). They can write about things they observe in the world, which children can also observe with their keen insight if they take the time and wonder about, as the late Valerie Worth did so beautifully in her small poems (Farrar):

Out of these shared interests come poems where the adult experience and the child experience intersect. The shock of recognition can be felt on both sides of the age divide, as long as the reader has ever had the experience of holding a handful of marbles and pouring them out. The poem tells the truth but isn’t attempting to explain anything about the manufacturing process of marbles, or inform readers that gravity is responsible for making the marbles move down, or describe how marbles were used in ancient Egypt.

Increasingly, adult poets write poems that don’t come out of their own experience, either as an adult or a child, and that don’t come out of the experiences of modern-day children. They write poems that fill a niche, that serve a purpose — poems that will be useful, where children will learn something by reading them.

From the publishers’ perspective, this must seem like a good thing: it must be much easier to successfully market a book that serves a purpose. Humorous poetry has always been easier to sell, partly because teachers and other well-meaning adults believe children only like funny poems. Perhaps they have been turned off to poetry themselves by years of deconstruction in school, and by the feeling that understanding poetry is a lot of work with too many pitfalls. In any case, Shel Silverstein’s or Jack Prelutsky’s funny modern poems can be very profitable, inclining publishers toward publishing a book that aims for the funny bone. Experiential poetry — poetry written as pure art — can be a tough sell in this practical world. Poetry that extends a school curriculum is much easier to market because there is a built-in audience (teachers), and even public libraries will purchase such poetry on the theory that boys like information best.

Purposeful poetry edifies rather than illuminates, and sometimes makes no bones about doing so. Take Nancy Elizabeth Wallace’s picture book Leaves! Leaves! Leaves! (Marshall Cavendish), which includes this poem as part of the informational back matter:

Clearly, this poem was written to teach children about photosynthesis, to be used as part of an overall lesson on trees in the fall. The author chose words to fit with the facts rather than carefully selecting the perfect words to capture the essence of leaves or a sense of wonder at the way nature fits together—the poem is strictly to help children understand that leaves turn the sun’s light into chlorophyll and that’s what makes the leaves green.

Teachers — or many of them, anyway — must be applauding the increase in poetry that teaches. With the emphasis today on cross-curricular teaching, a poem about volcanoes covers two subjects at once. So a series like Children’s Press’s Modern Rhymes about Ancient Times may appeal greatly to a teacher who is hard-pressed to find time to teach either social studies or poetry. And yet, one wonders how much of either subject a child learns from a verse like this from the volume on ancient Rome:

True, such poems may well help children retain the facts — they work quite well as memory devices. But bumpy, lurching meter and dubious rhymes fill the series, and the amount of information communicated is necessarily very limited. The Fresh Squeezed poetry series by Carol Diggory Shields also tries to teach facts through poetry, and these poems at least are frequently witty, incorporating imagery to convey the information and make better poetry, as this poem from BrainJuice: Science, Fresh Squeezed! (Handprint) shows:

Gravity’s the law,
And you may not adore it,
But I can tell you, buddy—
You’d better not ignore it.
Without our good friend gravity,
We’d be in big trouble,
Your bed, your house,
Your dog, your cat,
Would float around like bubbles. . . . .

nterestingly, science, with its leaps from what is easily understandable (flowers are plants) to what is unseen and hard to imagine (plants are made up of molecules), may make for better poetry because it forces the writer to put the almost unfathomable into words and therefore requires more imagination to articulate. In Myra Cohn Livingston’s poem “Comets,” from Space Songs(Holiday), she includes the science of comets but also expresses their wondrousness:

Many teachers use poetry as a way to practice writing, and if they have a child write a poem on Martin Luther King Jr., say, that assignment covers several subjects simultaneously. But what is a child being taught when (true story) he is reprimanded for not including enough facts in his poem? Such pointed writing assignments drive parents into libraries looking for samples of poems to match the child’s homework, and so demand is being created on the library end for poetry for the child who has to write a “career poem” or the one who is assigned to write a sonnet about his favorite food for a nutrition unit.

Sensing the market, poets begin trying to come up with poetry because it will fit into lesson plans. Betsy Franco created a book ingeniously pairing math with poetry in her Mathematickles! (McElderry). In it, she uses mathematical concepts together with words in a way that makes the reader look at the world a little differently, makes the reader’s brain twist just a bit:

Unfortunately, she followed up this elegantly succinct foray into cross-curriculum activity with the sprawling Counting Our Way to the 100th Day! (McElderry), a book clearly targeting teachers looking for material to celebrate that new school holiday, the Hundredth Day. Franco hasn’t lost her talent, and some of her 100 poems about the number 100 delight:

But because it is purposeful poetry — poetry written to serve a purpose — Franco must strain to incorporate the number 100, and she must pad the book to reach the total of 100 poems:

All poetry is purposeful in some way. But true poetry’s purpose must always be art in order to be true poetry. There’s tremendous variety in the forms art can take, and poetry is no exception, but we cannot truly say children are being exposed to poetry when the poetry they are being taught was written to teach about something factual. It’s a step back into the schoolroom of Mr. Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s scathing indictment of education, Hard Times. In the intervening 150 years since Dickens was writing, we surely have learned that children need more than “Facts, sir.” They need poetry.

From the May/June 2005 Horn Book Magazine

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