Module 2-NCTE Award Poetry/LS 5663-20

A jar of tiny stars: poems by NCTE award-winning poets. Bernice E. Cullinan. Honesdale, Pennsylvania: Boyds Mill Press, Inc., 1996. ISBN 1-56397-087-2
This book is a collection of NCTE award-winning poets. Each poet shares a source of the inspiration for their work. At the end of the book, not only do the award-winning poets share about their sources of inspiration, information is given about their life accomplishments. Many of the poems share about familiar childhood experiences, such as selling lemonade or the birth of a new puppy. Each of the poems were chosen by children and the poems consistently show evidence of the high quality of writing.
The following poem would be a great introduction to a poetry study.
How to eat a poem
-Eve Merriam
Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
Or stem
Or rind
Or pit
Or seed
Or skin
To throw away.
As a way to introduce this poem, I would have an assortment of fruit and talk about what happens when you eat a piece of fruit. Does juice run down your chin? Do you hear a crunch? Is the fruit soft, hard, squishy, or firm. As the students are sharing, I would have them brainstorm as many words as possible to describe the fruit. After the students eat a piece of fruit, I would read the poem and have the students think about what happened as they ate their piece of fruit. I would then have the students writing a line for a class book using the sentence starter, When I bit it my apple(or whatever their fruit is), the fruit was__________. If possible, I would use shaped -writing paper and have each student choose the shape closest to the fruit that they sampled. This activity could be also be used for a unit on the food pyramid and healthy eating habits.