Gathering Readers Makes Joyful Noise!

Our final session in Gathering Readers, a book club for young readers that I initiated here in Singapore was all about poetry! 🙂 The session was actually Friday of last week, but I was not able to find the time to blog about it during the day itself. Here are some of the photos taken during our poetry session:

I had quite a number of books spread out – and the kids were asked to choose the book of poetry which ‘spoke’ to them – they are to read the book and share what they loved most about it with everyone.

The kids were given a bit of time to go over the books – I had around 15-18 titles for the 8 book club members to choose from – mostly from the libraries, whereas the other titles were from my own collection. Then I asked them to introduce the book to the rest of the group.

Sophie shares her book choice: I Want to Be Free by Joseph Slate, illustrated by E. B. Lewis.

Jason chose Michael Rosen’s Book of Nonsense.

Here is Madilyn avidly sharing about Jack Prelutsky’s Scranimals illustrated by the inimitable Peter Sis.

Bobby shared Ellen Stern’s I Saw a Bullfrog.

Abraham was tickled by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s Science Verse

This is me talking about Shel Silverstein’s Don’t Bump the Glump.

My 10 year old daughter, Myka, chose Shel Silverstein’s Every Thing On It.

She wanted to read the poem Garlic Breath out loud.

I also shared with them the Newbery honor book Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischman. I thought that it would be cool to have the kids read aloud in two voices to welcome the New Year!

This is me intensely coaching the two boys how to read Fleischman’s poems. I was so happy to have found this helpful link from rbk12blog.com that allowed us to listen to audio clips of the poems being read aloud. It gave the kids some idea of what I was expecting from them.

Before we had our actual presentation, we had a few minutes break, and we also wrapped up our discussion of our supposed-featured novel for our book club: The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Here are some photos from their actual presentation from Joyful Noise:

I also took a video clip (which I managed to edit using iMovie, yay!) which featured fragments of the poetry that the children read. Hope you enjoy it! Do bear with the camera movements since I had some of the kids help out and be the ‘director’ while the poems were being read aloud. It was truly a joyful experience doing this book club with the kids. Until the next adventure!