Author Study

on

Jack Prelutsky

I love children's poems, consequently, whenever I can, I share this love with my students.  I have my favorites, but I do try to be fair, and expose my students to a variety of authors.  It seems that every year, the class as a whole, has a favorite.  One year it might be Shel Silverstein that they ask for, the next year it might be Loris Lesynski. 

Well, this year it was Jack Prelutsky.  So I gathered up as many Jack Prelutsky books that I could find (it was easy this year, he has a wealth of books published) and we read, and read, and read Jack Prelutsky's poems.

Once we had a feel for his poems, we decided that it might be a good idea to try and write one ourselves.  By far, the most favorite poems are the shape poems, "A Dizzy Little Duzzle" , "I Was Walking in a Circle", "I am Stuck Inside a Seashell", "I'm Caught Up in Infinity", and "I am Winding Through a Maze. (I think it's because they like to see me struggle to read it, turning the book in all directions.)  I didn't want to start out with shape poems, but we'll try it after we have written some regular shaped poems.

So we began by discussing what Jack Prelutsky's poems had in common.  How were they able to recognize them when I read them? The students decided that his poems were funny, talked about imaginary things, and had lots of describing words.

We searched for a poem to act as a template for our first attempt.  Finally we decided on "I Wish I Had a Dragon".  We looked carefully at the format and loosely based our creations on Mr. Prelutsky's poem.