Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Super Silly School Poems
Illustrator: Liza Woodruff
Poetry Picture Book
For ages 5 to 7
Scholastic, 2014 ISBN: 978-0545479813
For many years children’s lives revolve around their school and the people they meet there. They have wonderful experiences that they treasure, and then there are those incidents that they would like to forget as soon as possible. For this picture book David Greenberg has written seventeen poems that explore school life in creative and amusing ways.
Every child has days when they realize that they have forgotten something, something that they know they need to take to school that day. In the poem Something you Forgot we meet a boy who has remembered his art project, his new markers and his backpack. He has his video game and his lunch money. He remembers to brush his teeth and yet there is still that something that he has forgotten. He gets “terribly distressed” because he just cannot remember what the something is, and then he looks in the mirror and realizes that he has “forgotten to get dressed.”
Further along in the book we encounter a poem that will surely resonate with young readers. The poem describes what it is like when you go to the grocery store and see something truly shocking. There is your teacher. Shopping. For food. How can this be? After all, “Teachers live at school,” and that is where they belong. Who is responsible for letting the teacher out?
Other topics in this book include school lunches, homework issues, show-and-tell, the school bathroom, and the way in which teachers seem to be adept mind readers.
Throughout the book the humorous poems are paired with illustrations that perfectly capture images that appear in the poems.
