Reading in the classroom: What are we looking for? Part 1

Compass points for exploring books and engaging readers

The following is an expanded and annotated list of the books I spoke about at the New Zealand Literacy Association conference, which I’ll post about in several parts. They cover poetry, picture books and narrative non-fiction. In time, I’ll compile a list of fiction titles.

I offer these titles as exemplars of the various elements I look for in reading with young people and recommending books for them:

• language play and stretch

• the shapeliness of story

• skilfully developed character and relationships across generations

• language and story that both mirror and affirm the known world and sharpen a lens on new worlds, other beings, different ideas

• the nuances and moral shadings of character

• the frailty and comedy of human behaviour

• transcendent moments of lived experience: joyous insight, wonder, inspiration, imaginative leaps and bounds.

Of course, these books aren’t the last word in reading possibilities — they’re merely a beginning. But I hope they suggest compass points for reading expansion — to enjoy or argue against — for the exploration of many more books in sundry forms.

I have linked a number of the books with creative writing possibilities in the classroom, a reminder of the powerfully enmeshed relationship between reading and writing.

Language: Play and performance

Ounce, Dice, Trice by Alastair Reid; illustrated by Ben Shahn; The New York Review Children’s Collection

‘The way to get the feel of a word, ’ writes the Scottish poet, Alistair Reid, in this dazzlingly playful book, ‘is to begin with a sound and let it grow.’

He proceeds accordingly, ‘growing’ two lists of words based on the sounds zzz and og. Lists abound in this book: ‘light’ words include ariel, willow, spinnaker, petticoat … On the other hand, blunderbuss, galoshes, pumpkin and mugwump are ‘heavy’ words, while words to be said on the move might be fluctuate, wobble, twirl and pirouette. There are ‘odd words’ (to be spoken out loud for fun): dog-eared, oaf, egg, oblong. Clearly, onomatopoeia is in play, but the term isn’t mentioned. Literary devices aren’t the name of the game here — Reid is asking the reader to revel in the effect of language on the ear and in the mouth, an eternal pleasure for the young (and old!), distinct from the important though rather more functional work of decoding and making meaning.

‘All the words here,’ he writes in his introduction, ‘are meant to be said aloud, over and over, for your own delight.’

Reid resurrects antique words and arcane collective nouns; he invents words because their sounds please him (ploo, snigglement, tris-tras), then suggests what they might describe. There are lists of potential names — for cats, twins, elephants, insects, houses, and nitwits: joskin, slammerkin, cloaf … And, wonderfully, the patterns of alternative numbers when you get tired of counting one, two, three — one of which gives the book its name: Ounce, dice, trice, quartz, quince, sago … An altogether delightful medley which also offers many prompts for imaginative language games at home and in classroom. Creating neologisms and then inventing meanings for the new words is terrific fun at any age.

Supposing … by Alastair Reid; illustrated by JooHee Yoon; Enchanted Lion Books

This gloriously mischievous series of imaginings and conjectures is a perfect creative writing model for playful, ‘what if’ writing. Who could resist the imaginative banditry of say,

'Supposing I telephoned people I didn’t know in the middle of the night and practiced my horrible sounds over the phone.'

Or,

'Supposing there were 12 of me …’

Or,

‘Supposing I read a book about how to change into animals and said a spell and changed myself into a cat and when I climbed on the book to change myself back I found I couldn’t read …'

Poems to read aloud

Seagull, Seagull Selected poems from The Tree House by James K Baxter; illustrated by Kieran Rynhart; Gecko Press

Available through National Library's school lending service: Seagull, Seagull.

Baxter’s poems for children, written in the 1950s, were first published in 1974 as The Treehouse (Price Milburn) and have had at least three iterations over the last fifty years, with different selections and illustrators.

The illustrations by Kieran Rynhart for this handsome edition might be the most successful match yet for Baxter’s celebration of childhood delight and imaginative speculation. Rynhart’s beautiful linework and adventurous perspectives underscore the rollicking rhythm and pulse of the poems and elevate the sense of expansiveness available in both backyard play and the adventure of being at large in the natural world or the realm of adults. He plants the reading eye in thrilling, almost perilous, points of view — sheep on a vertiginous cliffside accompany ‘The Shepherd’; the shepherd and his dog in the distance have equally precarious footing. In ‘The Seagull’, the reader, like the bird, rides high above a stretch of beach, and ‘the broad sea burning‘ from here the ‘men and women/And girls and boys/Look far, far smaller/Than painted toys’. In ‘The Gorse Fire’, two children standing on a tussocky hill watch, awed and perhaps anxious, as thick ribbons of smoke climb ‘the brown hillside/Like a river on fire’; a tree house in a hilltop willow tree is observed from far below, its invitation to fun and games irresistible.

These poems beg to be read aloud — rhythm and rhyme at its best, and a pervasive mischievous — ‘what if?’ at the heart of many poems. ‘If I was king of Sweden’ hums with the eternal childhood longing to seize agency, rule the realm and do only and forever the things a child craves most:

‘Each day would be my birthday/I’d buy fizzy drinks in kegs;/Once a month there’d be an Easter/With enormous Easter eggs.’

Anthologies by Paul Janeczko

Poet, anthologist, and teacher Janeczeko, was a significant presence in American children’s poetry, a writer of boundless energy, invention, and generosity. These anthologies are among the last of his 50-plus books published since the 1980s. A collaboration with artist Chris Rashka and publisher Candlewick, one of the USA’s most adventurous independent publishers, this quintet of books is a joyous celebration of poetry for young people in its many forms and voices.

A Poke in the I: A Collection of Concrete Poems

Available through National Library's school lending service: A Poke in the I.

The title of A Poke in the I immediately suggests the playful fusion of form and content between the book's covers. Raschka’s exuberant washi collages are a perfect match for the verve and wit of the poems; both are reader-friendly and highly stimulating — blowing open the concrete form for young people. The poems range from the largely visual — where the illustrative and typographical effects carry most of the poem’s meaning — to more complex (but thoroughly accessible) linguistic and visual conceptions. The result is a feast for the eye and a seductive challenge for the imagination.

A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms

Available through National Library's school lending service: A Kick in the Head.

A Kick in the Head traverses poetic forms across the centuries, beginning with foundational structures like couplet, dactyl, tercet, quatrain, haiku and working through familiar forms — sonnet, ode, acrostic, elegy, ballad — to the more complex, such as roundel, pantoum and villanelle. The tour is completed with contemporary formal adventures — list poems, found poems, persona poems, poems of address.

The poems’ subjects speak most often to our contemporary world: the ode, for example — traditionally a lyric form celebrating exalted subjects (nature, people, momentous events) — is, here, in praise of a poor Mexican boy’s tennis shoes, his sole, precious footwear. Similarly, the found poem, ‘The Paper Trail’, uses written material that floated down from the twin towers destroyed on 9/11 … a cell-phone bill, a handwritten note about plans for a parents’ pot-luck dinner, a blank cheque folded neatly in half. The whole is a kind of democratising of poetic subject matter — through multiple voices, humours, incidents and ideas. It’s a great classroom text for vaulting into student experimentation, with a variety of forms providing scaffolding for poems that foreground the small details and commonplace matters of their own lives.

A Foot in the Mouth; Poems to Speak, Sing and Shout (all) edited by Paul Janeczko; illustrated by Chris Raschka; Candlewick Press

Available through National Library's school lending service: A Foot in the Mouth.

A Foot in the Mouth offers three dozen poems across a couple of centuries, celebrating poetry read aloud in order to feel the music and bounce of language and imagery, the effects of rhythm and pace. The poems are organised into categories — poems for several voices; bilingual poems; anthemic poems; short, pungent poems that are easy to memorise. Again, the poetry varies in style, form, and temper — and all are rich models for creative writing.

I have often used ‘I Hear America Singing’ by Walt Whitman as a model for students to explore, through poetry, their street, suburb, hometown, rural or school community. Whitman’s rhapsodic litany of America’s workers in their habitats is easily translatable to young people’s own communities, their singular characters and activities.

Similarly, ‘My Memories of the Nicaraguan Revolution’ by Eugenio Alberto Cano Correa, a seven-line stanza recalling a traumatic conflict experienced in childhood, is rendered in concise, sensory-heavy language — an excellent lesson in recording a significant autobiographical experience through careful language choice, distillation, and implication (aka showing rather than telling).

See also:

• The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in 50 Objects by Paul Janeczko & Chris Raschka; Candlewick Press.

• Firefly July: A Year of Very Short Poems selected by Paul Janeczko; illustrated by Melissa Sweet; Candlewick Press.

Verse fiction

Iris and Me by Philippa Werry; Ahoy!/Cuba Press

Available through National Library's school lending service: Iris and Me.

This immersive book is a verse novel, a hybrid form that deploys fiction’s narrative shape but distils language — like poetry — and heightens its role in the storytelling. Werry has structured her narrative around the intrepid travels of journalist Iris Wilkinson (also known as Robyn Hyde, a significant mid-century NZ writer) through China during the Sino-Japanese war.

The story is told from the perspective of Iris’s constant companion, an unnamed ‘accessory’ revealed only midway through the book. Through a controlled non-linear narrative, we dip back and forth between significant moments in Iris’s much-storied life and the shocking period in China. The vertical verse shape on the page and verse-like line breaks of the narrative — which create a lot of white space — make this a very approachable read for different skill levels, while simultaneously offering language riches. There are gentle by ear-catching alliterations and assonance — on Rakiura, fat tūī drunk on honey tumbled out of the trees/bellbirds chimed and shining cuckoos trilled/muttonbirds crooned in their barrows/seals splashed among the rocks.

The evocation of new places and people is piquant and delightful — the language swung and sang in our ears./Its script climbed like spiky twigs/over posters, signs and shopfronts. Werry’s judicious lists of rich nouns become poems — compacted sensory evocations of place and people. Most poignantly, a litany of children’s names, freighted with meaning, is repeated pages later, this time as an elegy following the children’s almost certain deaths.

Little Horse
Field
Plough
Spade
Miss-Flower-That-We-Eat
Small Moon

A compelling story that also offers valuable cultural-historical lessons, a rich appreciation of figurative language, and an innovative narrative structure that’s an excellent prompt for creative writing adventure in the classroom.

Poems in the New Zealand School Journal

Of course, one of the best places to find diverse contemporary poetry for the classroom is the New Zealand School Journal — 118 years old and still marvellous! The following are excellent poems showcasing a range of subjects, forms, moods, contemporary and historical moments, and bravura language play. All provide launching pads for students’ exploration of subjects close to their own hearts and experiences. And these are just a taster — the back-lists of the School Journal are a mouth-watering cache of material written for the tamariki and rangitahi of Aotearoa.

‘Brave Flower’ by Simone Kaho; Level 4 School Journal, 4 November 2018 — a vivid snapshot of the fear, humiliation, dashed hopes, and bafflement experienced by tangata o le moana during the dawn raids of the 1970s.

‘Acrostic Poem’ by Tim Upperton; Level 3 School Journal August 2018 — the poet takes the mickey out of the ubiquitous acrostic poem; using an extended metaphor, he suggests the poem’s words are wild animals gagging to escape the confines of the acrostic’s rules:

                                               They are escaping from your
poem. Listen! The lions have broken
out
                               They are
                                             so hungry. What will they
eat                                           
                                             They have been dying to
meet
                                                             you.

‘No Sun’ by James Brown; Level 3 School Journal, May 2016 — a short poem having fun with the idea of the sun suddenly going awol. Brown is brilliant at silly situations, sly rhymes, taut rhythms, and unexpected similes: The stars flickered like a weak joke …

‘Songs of Home’ by Lynley Edmeads; Level 3 School Journal, June 2024 — an elegy for a deceased relative expressed through simple treasures:

This little pair of blue booties/And the clump of blonde hair … this boarding pass, this bookmark/this lace doily with spots of brown … Don’t forget this pocket guide/to New Zealand birds with its message/in the front: “So you’ll always remember/the songs of home".

A brilliant lesson in the way emotions are often more powerfully evoked in a poem through material objects — or as William Carlos Williams put it: ‘No ideas but in things’.

‘Tokotoko’ by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall; Level 4 School Journal, June 2023 — a poem of whakapapa by way of the ceremonial carved walking stick that, in te ao Māori, symbolises a speaker’s authority. The poet addresses the tokotoko, naming the material, labour, skill, and countless seasons that went into its making, and signals how it connects tūpuna across the centuries with whānau in the present.

‘Huia’ by Bill Manhire; Level 3 School Journal, November 2020 — an achingly beautiful poem mourning the loss of the bird — tapu to Māori — through colonisation, greed, fashion fads, money-making, and the destruction of the huia’s habitats. The poem’s deceptive simplicity, its gentle rhyme and rhythm seem to echo both birdsong and old songs of lamentation. I sang upon a postage stamp/I sang upon your coins/but money stepped towards me/and stole away my voice.

‘No Rhyme’ by Tim Upperton; Level 3 School Journal, August 2015 — Upperton poses a challenge to the student poet: Go wild! Turn away from the tired rhymes and obvious similes! Goodbye to cat on the mat: Imagine what might happen/if the cat sat on the piano instead … making a new music: strange/unpredictable sounds that, until now,/the world has never heard.

‘The Stinging Moon’ by Rata Gordon; Level 3 School Journal, June 2023 ­— a spirited poem celebrating imaginative transformation and the sonics of language. The poet is beachcombing and, stumbling on a mysterious form (probably a jellyfish), is so delighted by its oddness she is moved to vocalise its wonder:

a big bubble
a jiggly bobble
a crystal wobble
a circle of snot
an ink blot
a sea sack
an injured
flat-pack
planet

Read more

In her post Conversations about reading and books, Kate writes about the poem ‘Whispers to the Wall’ by Rebecca Kai Dotlich; from A Kick in the Head.

Poetry Box is a poetry website curated by New Zealand poet Paula Green. The website is an excellent resource that celebrates the life of poetry in classrooms across Aotearoa and the delightful work of ākonga from many schools.

See also these pages on the National Library website:

• Poetry

• Verse novels

• Reading aloud.