Here's A Little Poem: A Very First Book of Poetry

Yolen, Jane and Andrew Fusek Peters. 2007. HERE’S A LITTLE POEM: A VERY FIRST BOOK OF POETRY. Ill. by Polly Dunbar. Massachusetts: Candlewick Press.

The sixty-poems in the collection HERE’S A LITTLE POEM center around topics that are familiar to pre-school and primary grade children and are divided into the four categories: Me, Myself and I, Who Lives in My House?, I Go Outside, and Time for Bed. Yolen and Peters find many remarkable poems that cross the cultural divide and show that all children feel the same emotions and have many life experiences in common, such as: having a birthday party, playing at the beach, eating food they do not like, and looking at the stars. With bright and simplistic illustrations that depict the fun and joy in childhood, children will laugh out-loud with the pictures and the text as they listen to the poems. The poems have a rhythmic flow to the lines that beg to be chanted as they are read aloud. With end rhymes generally falling in the second and fourth lines of each stanza, children will enjoy guessing and calling out the ending word for each fourth line in poems such as The NO-NO Bird saying, “I’m the no-no bird, that’s right, that’s me. I live up in the Tantrum Tree.”