Sing a Song of Popcorn: Every Child’s Book of Poems, Selected by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, Eva Moore, Mary Michaels White, Jan Carr

            This book has poetry that covers a wide variety of topics including rhyme, weather, silliness, and feelings. The poems come from a variety of sources and cover a wide range of grade levels. For example, the poems from the “In a Few Words” section are short with simple vocabulary that a kindergartener or first-grader could read independently. However, some of the poems like Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are longer and require students to make more inferences based upon prior knowledge, so it would be more suitable for third grade or older. The illustrations for the poems are created by these Caldecott Medal artists: Marcia Brown, Leo and Diane Dillon, Richard Egielski, Trina Schart Hyman, Arnold Lobel, Maurice Sendak, Marc Simont, and Margot Zemach. Each of these talented artists illustrated all of the poems for a different section in the book. Because of this, each of the illustration styles are different in each section, and all of the illustrations add value and understanding to the poems.

            As previously mentioned, different poems in this book are appropriate for different grade levels. Therefore, this book would be a great addition to any elementary classroom library. Because different students within a grade are on varying reading levels, this book could easily accommodate nearly all of the students in a classroom when studying poems. If I had this book at a reading center in first grade, I would have a sticky note or a bookmark on the poems that I would recommend the first graders read. However, I would make sure the students know that they are free to explore the other poems and challenge themselves. If I were teaching an older grade about poems and figurative language, I would select a more advance poem like Robert Frost’s or “Windy Nights” by Robert Louis Stevenson to do a whole class lesson or small group study. From an artistic perspective, the students could compare and contrast the media and styles of the nine different illustrators because none of the artists create the same style of art.