Product Details

• Author: Judith Tannenbaum
• Grade Range: K-2

• Media: 88 pp/paper
• ISBN: 978-157110-323-9
• Item No.: WEB-0323

Teeth, Wiggly as EarthquakesTeeth, Wiggly as Earthquakes guides teachers who want to explore writing poetry with their primary students. The lessons are easy to follow and contain numerous model poems written by primary students. Lessons build on one another in their exploration and use of image and sound as well as in their organization into themes. The book contains information on how to create projects, publications, and performances once students have created a body of poems. There are also ideas for incorporating poetry more fully into a primary classroom.

Judith Tannenbaum gives teachers information while also respecting their intelligence. They can use the book as a step-by-step guide and then, as they feel more comfortable with poems, adapt the lessons, add model poems by their own students, and make up entirely new lessons. The book includes examples of how other primary teachers did just that. As author and teacher, Carol Avery writes:

"After reading this book I was inspired to use some of the ideas that Judith suggests, but I did not feel shuttled into a lock step approach that ignores differences among children. I found that the approach here provides expertise and direction but leaves plenty of room for individual adaptation and innovation. I'm impressed with the author's responses to children. They are responses that honor children's thinking and respect them as individuals. Judith never comes across as superior to children. She clearly has the expertise to share with children but provides opportunity for children to bring their own expertise to the writing. . . . This teacher/poet knows how to bring out the best in children."

Table of Contents

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Contents
How to Use This Book: What Is a Poem?
General Principles
Preparing for Poetry: The First Lesson
Group Poems: How to Lead a Class in Creating a Group Poem
Body Poems
Writing from Objects
Writing About Feelings
Personifying Emotions
Individual Poems: How to Work with Students to Create Individual Poems
Writing from Sensory Experience
Question Poems and Personification
Question Poems: Personifying Imagination
Developing a Theme: Moon, Night, and Pretending and Monsters
Onomatopoeia
Alliteration
Repetition
Repetition Again: "I Am" Poems
More Attention to Sound
Walking Excursion to Write Poems
Heart Poems 1
Heart Poems 2
Poems About Friends and Family
Incorporating Poems into the Curriculum
From Poems to Programs: Kindergarten Adaptations by Pam Marquardt
Projects, Publications, and Performances
Reading Poems Out Loud in the Classroom
Other Ways to Use Poetry in the Classroom
Postscript: Why We Hesitate to Teach Poetry...and Why We Should Do It Anyway by Pam Marquardt
Bibliography

Judith Tannenbaum
Judith Tannenbaum is a writer and teacher whose work has focused on community arts and issues of cultural democracy. She currently serves as training coordinator for San Francisco's WritersCorps program.
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