The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry Compiled by Bill Martin Jr. and Michael Sampson

The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry features 200 poems by Bill Martin Jr.’s favorite authors.  I loved reading the poems in this book!  First of all, a lot of the poems are extremely humorous and have great rhyme schemes.  Second, the illustrations, which are all done by well-known illustrators of children’s books, are phenomenal and make poetry very accessible to young children.  I know the beauty of poetry is the in the fact that people are allowed to create their own mental images from the words the author paints.  However, when children are just being introduced to poetry, the format and word positioning is often confusing and it helps to have illustrations that assist in grasping the full meaning of the poem.  For me, I think it is hard to get children excited about poetry unless they connect to it and I think well done illustrations are one way to establish this connection.  Another thing I liked about this book is how it is organized according to themes, such as animals, people and places, school time, me and my feelings, Mother Goose, and nonsense.  I think it really helps to show children that poetry can be about anything and this layout makes it easy to find a poem about a certain topic. 
            This is a book I most definitely will have in my classroom as a resource.  In fact, I plan on purchasing a copy in the near future.  Children will have fun saying the poems out loud and looking at the great illustrations.  My hope is to have a variety of poetry books in the classroom, and each day, have a different child read a poem to the class in the morning.  I think this is a good activity because children can practice speaking in front of an audience and, because many of the poems are humorous, it would give the class a chuckle which is a great way to start the day.  When it comes to a poetry unit, I think this book does a lot of the work for the teacher. It provides hundreds of high quality poems that can be used as poetry examples.  Many of the poetry styles in this book can be borrowed for the purpose of having the students create their own poems.  I think it is important that children write their own poems because it allows them to break from the traditional sentence.  It also helps build vocabulary by giving them opportunities to practice finding that perfect word.    

Year Published: 2008        
Notable Information: Foreword by Eric Carle and Afterword by Steven Kellogg