You’re a Poet: Ways to Start Writing Poems

K-Gr 2–Words and imagination are key to writing poetry in the careful instructions of the five lessons in this book. Each lesson has two segments. The first segment is a story about a very young, humanized Piglet with his mom, dad, or friend Squirrel. In stacked poetic lines and cartoon style drawings softly shaded in watercolor, the stories tell of everyday outings in which Piglet comes up with lines of poetry. The following set of reader instructions suggests ways of creating a poem similar to the one just offered by Piglet. A simple string of words forms the first poem; other poems include making comparisons, turning a thing into a person, writing about oneself, and thinking about what to give someone as a gift. The story and instruction segments seem mismatched in audience, with the stories at a preschool level and the instructions addressed to children who can write by hand to shape and reshape their word choices. Scattered with images of pens and pencils, instruction pages include “Writing Secrets” framed as simple white pages.