With a Poet's Eye: Children Translate the World

A poet takes the million and one things the world offers, pays close attention, and using the tools of poetry-music and image and word-translates the world's gifts into poems. This may seem like a luxury few teachers can afford, especially for children who have trouble sitting still, processing language, and mastering basic writing skills. But poetry, Jane McVeigh and Mary Lynn Ellis claim, enables all children to say what they see, think, and feel most deeply, and will help them to become stronger writers in every other genre. "With a Poet's Eye" takes teachers beyond the important notion of sharing passions into more specific suggestions for helping elementary students understand what poems can do in their lives. Replete with suggestions of poems to share and activities to promote writing, it is far more than a recipe book. Instead it is a chronicle of two teachers who have grown and developed as writers, of two friends who inherently and irrevocably value poetry. Their commitment to teaching poetry is contagious. The authors show how young children come to love playing with language as they make poems, how poetry is part of the entire curriculum-history, mythology, fine arts, music, science, and language arts-and how it affects the ways children and adults view the world and their own parts in it. The book is enriched by numerous samples of poems by published poets as well as students, illustrating the efficacy of the teaching practices they describe as well as the pure power of poetry itself. "With a Poet's Eye" fills an important need for more information and guidance on teaching poetry. Preservice and inservice language arts teachers will find the authors' stories both inspiring and encouraging.

Review :
?Through in-depth dialogue, this gifted duo exposes their classes to poetry through music, art, dreams, letters, and the natural world. They capture the essence of what poetry is, its power to transform through metaphor, and the joy of seeing anew through one's own "Poet's Eye."?-Voices from the Middle "Through in-depth dialogue, this gifted duo exposes their classes to poetry through music, art, dreams, letters, and the natural world. They capture the essence of what poetry is, its power to transform through metaphor, and the joy of seeing anew through one's own "Poet's Eye.""-Voices from the Middle