 Hi everyone, my name is Steph, this is Little Bookish Teacher, and today I'm going to share some poetry collections that I'm actually going to be taking into the classroom with me this year, and then I'm going to be reading with my second grade students. I am a big fan of poetry, I always have been. It's one of my favorite units to teach in writing, it's also one of my favorite things to explore with students. And I'm really excited this year with year two students to be able to explore some more in depth. And I've come up with a bit of a plan because I've been collecting poetry anthologies for a while, and I don't have all of them here with me, but I have most of them. And I've had an idea for how I actually want to integrate poetry into our everyday classroom routines, because poetry is such a wonderful way to introduce students to new vocabulary, to sentence structure, to new forms of poetry as well, because quite often they just hear about the same poetic styles over and over again. It's also a great way to talk about author's voice. It's a great way to start thinking about connections that we make to the world around us. So there's a huge amount of power in it, and if you find really short poems, it doesn't have to take loads of time in the classroom, or just in your general life if you want to read poetry with your own children. So we're going to go through a couple of poetry anthologies. And then I also have two teacher books that I actually reference quite heavily whenever I teach poetry. So I thought I would share them in here as well. So we are going to start off with the two poetry collections that really prompted this idea. And it's not a new idea that I've had. I actually used one of these books when I was teaching a year three and four composite class a couple of years ago, and during our poetry unit we started every day by reading a poem. And the idea came from this collection, I'm the seed that grew the tree, a nature poem for every day of the year. These were selected by Fiona Walters and illustrated by Fran Preston Gannon. Now this is a very, very, very chunky collection. It is a very stunning book and it quite literally has a poem for every day of the year. Every month is broken up, there is a title page for the month that lists all the poems, and then you open up the book and it has the date and also the poem. So we would just read whatever the poem was for the day. Now the thing about this particular collection is that it is a Northern Hemisphere seasonally themed book, which doesn't always work out as well over here in Australia because our seasons are flipped. But the other day I was at the bookstore and I found that there is another collection that's been compiled by Fiona Walters. And it is Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, an animal poem for every day of the year. So now I have both of them and it's exactly the same format, a poem for every day of the year, also beautifully illustrated. And my plan for these two books is I'm actually going to introduce them to my students on the first day of school. And every day that I'm in the classroom, I'm in the classroom three days a week, I am going to just rotate through our class role and let students decide whether we read the nature poems or the animal poems collection. And that's how we're going to start our day. Just as we get ready for everything, we're going to read the poem. And I think that's going to be a really nice little routine for us to get into. So that's what's kind of inspired this, although I will say these are very, very heavy books. So I'll keep you posted on how that goes throughout the year. But I'm really looking forward to it because I think it will give us a really great way to explore language in a very short, succinct way. Another poetry collection that I have that's actually already at work is This Is Home, Essential Australian Poems for Children, selected by Jackie French and illustrated by Tanya McCartney. This is a really gorgeous collection of Australian poems, obviously, other title. And it does feature some very classic Australian poetry, as well as some contemporary poetry that is very suited for school students. So I'm really excited to also have this one in the classroom library, as well as a boat of stars, new poems to inspire and chant. This one is edited by Margaret Connolly and Natalie Jane Pryor. And I've had this one for years. It's absolutely gorgeous. It's very much geared towards students. They are fun. They're illustrated. There's a lot of different poetic styles and lots of different very thematically appropriate poems. So that one is always a favorite and one that I put out for the students just to read at their own leisure. I've also had Julia Donaldson's poems to perform a classic collection chosen by the Children's Laureate. So she put this together when she was the Children's Laureate. And it is just a really wonderful collection. It features a variety of poems, a variety of poetic forms. And the idea behind this collection is that these are all poems that are written to be spoken aloud. So they actually, so they're great ones to actually reproduce and actually have students participate in the reading of because they're designed to be spoken out loud. And that's a really great way to help students with reading out loud as well, because they're short. They're usually a motive and a lot of fun. And then the last anthology that I'm going to mention is one I've talked about recently. It was in my Victorian Premiers Literary Award Children's Shortlist. And it's the sound of the thing by Maxine Beneba-Clark, 100 new poems for young people. So Maxine Beneba-Clark is the poet laureate for the University of Melbourne. She has put this collection together. And it is amazing. It is really, really wonderful. I think when I spoke about it in the other video said there's lots of different poetic forms in here from traditional verse to haiku to free verse to acrostic poems, which it's really hard to find decent examples of acrostic poems to teach, because some of them are just not all that interesting. There's limericks and rhyming couplets and a whole lot of different things. And then at the back of the book, there is also a list of which poems are which poetic form. So this is a really handy one if you're teaching. So this one I plan on using as I'm actually teaching my poetry unit, because I think it's going to be really useful to have some really amazing mentor text poems that are written by an Australian to use with my class. And then there are two teaching resources that I absolutely love for teaching poetry. The first one is by Peter, which is the Primary English Teachers Association of Australia. And this one is teaching poetry for pleasure and purpose. This one was put together by Sally Murphy. And I love this one because it goes through why, what is the purpose behind teaching poetry? And then it also goes through every year level in a primary school. So Foundation or kindergarten, year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, year six. The really cool thing about the way this has been formatted is you have what is expected at that particular year level. So we're looking at year two at the moment. What kind of poetic forms do we teach at that year level? And then they have mentor text examples. And they're fantastic. They're simple. They're very accessible for students. And then there is a list of additional resources. So if you're in Australia, this is a really wonderful resource to have because it's short, it's very accessible and is just delightful. And then another one that I have, which is more geared towards sort of middle and upper primary, but is also great to sort of differentiate up and down, is Awakening the Heart by Georgia Heard, Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School. And this is about exploring poetry in our world and how we can find ways to incorporate it into the classroom, the ways that we can talk about it with students, the ways that we can teach with writing, there's strategies for teaching it. There are mentor text examples in here. There's examples of student work. It's a very easy read. It's a really lovely book. And I do like to dip in and out of this one. This was the first book that I had read about the Doors of Poetry. And I did a really fun unit on Doors of Poetry with my three, four students a few years ago that I absolutely loved that came from this book. So this is another really great resource. If you are not someone who feels super confident with teaching poetry, those are the poetry books that I'm taking into my second grade classroom. And I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be a lot of fun. As I said at the start, poetry is just a great way to explore language with students. It's a great way to up their text intake on a daily basis without it needing to take a very long time. In the comments, I would love to know if you are a fan of poetry and what your favorite poetry collections are. I also read adult poetry as well. And I have been reading some amazing adult poetry collections, particularly in the second half of 2023 and hope to continue to do so in 2024. So any poetry collection you would like to share with me down below for free to let me know. Otherwise, if you want to let me know that you're here, but you don't leave a comment for free to leave a tiger emoji down below. And I hope that wherever you're in the world, you're staying safe and healthy. And I'll see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye, everyone.