April is Poetry Month – and always a great opportunity to encourage kids to have fun with language.
Paper Dolls
by Julia Donaldson
HarperCollins
ISBN: 978 0 230 74108 9
This story is about a little girl and the string of dolls she made and took on adventures, and also about how things may disappear, but live on in memory, and about making paper dolls one day with her own little girl. It’s lovely and sweet and fun, without ever lingering too much on either the awfulness of boys with scissors or on the sweetness of how things go on. A bit of fluff on first glance, it’s grown on me more with each reading, and now I think it’s not just cute, but a real charmer.
Julia Donaldson has a great way with rhythm and rhyme, and while this story is not told fully in rhyme, it features a repeating little ditty about the dolls that is great fun to say aloud on every other page, making the whole book bounce along joyfully- one of the great things that poetry can do.
“Wordles” are not poetry in the traditional sense, but a fun way of playing with the sounds of words that is nearly poetic in its form. So what exactly is a wordle? Wordles are groups of words that sound exactly the same but mean different things. Sort of extended homophones, you might say. So.
Heroes. He rows.
Uh, not her. A knotter? An otter!
and so on. All illustrated in a silly, quirky style that brings the goofy ones to life and makes the more esoteric things clear. It’s got the makings of a fun game outside of the book, as well, for kis who have the language skills for it, or hey, just to amuse ourselves in line…
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