Category: News

My friend Kelly Milner Halls recently participated in the Writing Process Blog Tour on her blog and asked me if I would follow her in the tour, answering a few questions about my writing. Of course, I said yes. Kelly is such a wonderful children’s author and all-around awesome human being that I thought it would be a great way to let my readers know about her and her books. She also asked Claire Rudolf Murphy to participate, and she should be posting her answers on her blog in the next couple of days.

I’ve asked Douglas Florian and Nikki Grimes to follow me in this blog tour, so next week you should be able to read about what they are working on and how and why they write what they do.

So, without further ado, here are my answers to the four questions posed on this blog tour:

What am I currently working on?

I’m currently working on a rhyming picture book. In the past, most of my books have been poetry collections, but these days I find myself writing more picture books.

How does my work differ from others in my genre?

With a few notable exceptions (e.g., Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, Douglas Florian) most children’s poetry books aren’t humorous. They tend to be more informational; poems about nature, animals, etc. So I guess it’s fair to say that my books differ from most children’s poetry books in that they are funny. At least, I hope they are. :-)

Why do I write what I write?

As a child, I loved hearing and reading funny poems and songs. So mostly I write the same sorts of things that I loved reading as a kid. I also loved reading kid detective novels, but I haven’t tried my hand at one of those yet.

What is my writing process?

Any time I get an idea, I jot it down in a note on my phone or laptop using Evernote.

I don’t have a regular writing time or location. I write whenever I can make time, and I do it wherever I happen to be. Usually that’s at home, but often I will go the the library or a coffee house to work.

When I am able to carve out a little time to write, I start by going through my ideas to find one that I would like to work on. I do all of my writing on my laptop computer using a number of programs, including Evernote, Rhymesaurus, Rhymezone.com and Thesaurus.com. I write and revise, write and revise, write and revise, until I feel like there is nothing else I can do to improve the poem. When I’m finished writing t, I file the poem in Evernote and then come back a day or two later. Often times I will see something I didn’t notice before, and I’ll make a few final revisions. At that point, the poem is usually ready for posting on my website or including in a manuscript.

May 12 is the birthday of English poet Edward Lear, who would be 209 years old if he were still alive. He is well known for his drawings as well as for the poems and limericks that he wrote. Lear has been called a nonsense poet because he liked to use made-up words along with real ones in his poems. He also wrote about fanciful things that wouldn’t happen in real life. You may have read or heard his most famous poem, “The Owl and the Pussycat,” which is often taught to young children. Here is a short excerpt:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Edward Lear grew up near London as one of 21 children in his family. He was raised by his sister Ann, who was more than 20 years older than him. Lear was often sick during his childhood, suffering from asthma and epilepsy among other health problems.

Lear’s drawings and paintings of animals were first published when he was a teenager. As an adult, he enjoyed traveling to faraway places and painting landscapes of what he saw in his travels. He published his first book of nonsense limericks in 1846.

A limerick is a kind of short, funny poem that has five rhyming lines and starts with the words, “There was a…” Limericks usually have the same kind of rhythm. Edward Lear didn’t invent this kind of poem, but he did help to make it popular.

Here is one of Edward Lear’s nonsense limericks. Try reading it out loud and notice the rhythm and rhyme patterns:

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!”

If you like these, here are a few more of Edward Lear’s most famous poems:

• The Owl and the Pussycat
• The Quangle Wangle’s Hat
• The Jumblies
• The Pobble Who Has No Toes
• The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo

There are always at least 100 funny poems for kids on Poetry4kids.com, which you have always been able to choose from based on their popularity or subject matter. Now I’ve also added the ability to select poems based on their reading level.

To view the poems on Poetry4kids.com organized by reading level, simply click on Poems by Reading Level in the menu. My hope is that this will help make it easier for teachers to select poems at an appropriate reading level for their students.

The poems are sorted by grade level based on their ATOS readability score, the reading level system used by the Accelerated Reader program. Because these scores are computer generated, they may not be 100% accurate, but should still make it easier to find poems suitable for students of any given age.

Once you select a poem, you can always find out more about it’s grade level measures and text statistics (number of words, number of lines, average word length, etc.) by scrolling down to the bottom of the poem’s page.

Illustration by Deam Macadam for TFK

Congratulations to the winners of the 2014  TIME for Kids Poetry Contest! I had so much fun reading all the entries and selecting the winners, plus a few “honorable mentions.” There were over 2100 entries this year; the most ever!

The grand-prize winning poem this year was by 10-year-old Benjamin Ecsedy. His poem “Mess” was absolutley wonderful. His prizes include a free autographed copy of my book The Armpit of Doom and a free online author visit for his class.

In addition to Benjamin’s wonderfully funny poem, the runner-up winners were “Stranded in Paradise” by 14-year-old John Vernaglia, “My Elephant” by 10-year-old Maddy Harmon, and “Expelled” by 12-year-old Ella Smith.

You can read all of the winners, plus several honorable mentions on the TIME for Kids website, and in TIME for Kids Magazine.

A big congratulations to all of the winners and honorable mentions, and to all of the kids who took the time to write a poem and submit it. If I could have, I would have picked a hundred winners. There were at least that many poems that were true winners in my eyes.

If you are a teacher, librarian, or other adult who uses children’s poetry as an educational tool, Poetry Aloud Here 2: Sharing Poetry with Children by Sylvia M. Vardell is a book you need to know about. This outstanding resource provides educators with tons of practical information on teaching poetry in both formal and informal settings, including including how and why to promote poetry to children, strategies for presenting poetry to kids, what kinds of poems children enjoy, biographies of many important children’s poets, follow-up activities, web resources, and so much more.

This revamped and expanded edition of the original Poetry Aloud Here! details best practices gleaned from years in the field, with numerous suggestions that cross the curriculum from literature to science and math, and includes expanded lists of poems, in-depth poet profiles, book-poetry pairings, and other tools useful for programming and collection development.

About the Author

Sylvia M. Vardell is currently Professor at Texas Woman s University in the School of Library and Information Studies, where she teaches graduate courses in children s and young adult literature. She has published articles in Book Links, Language Arts, English Journal, The Reading Teacher, The New Advocate, Young Children, Social Education, and Horn Book, as well as several chapters and books on language and literature. A presenter at many state, regional, national, and international conferences, Vardell organizes the “Poetry Round Up” session at the Texas Library Association conference. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1983.

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