Rolling, Rollicking Fun For the Ages

When I first thought about what poetry I would like to read, I immediately thought of Shel Silverstein; he was a favorite of mine and probably the one of very few poets whose work I could stand. However, when I actually went to find a book of poetry, I found myself looking for something else. That was when I found It’s Raining Pigs and Noodles by Jack Prelutsky. It is New York Times bestseller, so I decided to give it a try. And found that I could not put it down. There are hundreds of poems in here, and I find myself moving from poem to poem, pausing for only a few moments between every poem to think about it. Each one is different and yet the style is the same for all; very readable for students and on topics that they would find interesting. There are fun poems, such as Hiccup, devious poems such as My Parents Have the Flu Today, and semi-serious poems such as The Sun is Sinking in the Sky. Each poem can be related to by a different child.

As I was reading, I found myself thinking of different ways that I could use these poems. The first thing that came to mind was the use it could have for vocabulary and teaching how to use strategies to improve reading skill. There are a lot of words that younger students would need to sound out; because a lot of these words make the poems, students would need to learn to decipher the word before continuing. Although there is an obvious benefit to using them for Language Arts to teach different grammatical and creative structures, I was looking more at what uses they might have in the other subjects. My Sister Shrieked, Astonished can be used in math to introduce gravity and how objects move. Many can be used as little add-ons to a science lesson. Students stop liking poetry because they are forced to read and analyze poets like Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. They have to come up with poems of their own that follow specific grammatical patterns. But with Prelutsky, although there are rhyming patterns that he follows, his point in a lot of poems is to show how diverse poetry can be. I can stand reading poetry because my introduction to poetry was through Shel Silverstein, another poet that uses similar mechanisms. Jack Prelutsky’s Its Raining Pigs & Noodles follows the same idea in relating to children by using wacky structures, catchy phrases, and subjects that children would really like.

Just for fun, I googled lesson plans for Prelutsky’s poems. Not too much to my surprise, I found several websites that included multiple resources for teaching poetry and using Jack Prelutsky’s work. This one was the best I found, because not only does it include lesson plans, but also multiple little easter eggs that I think would help teach students how much fun reading and writing really can be: http://www.webenglishteacher.com/prelutsky.html. I would encourage people to find lesson plans on their own or develop them and share; there are any number of ways each of these poems could be used.

As a further note, these poems can be enjoyed just as much by adults and will have all ages rolling off their chairs in seconds.