Earth Verse: Haiku from the Ground Up. Written by Sally M Walker and illustrated by William Grill. Published 2018, 48 pages.

Before we read the book we watched this video with Kwame Alexander on writing haiku. Gage loved his energy and after we finished the book came back to the computer to watch 3 or 4 more of his videos about poetry. Kwame for the homeschool win!

It’s filled with a haiku on each page about some aspect of the earth. The last dozen pages are packed full of information about what the haiku has introduced. This book was fine, but I was hoping for more.

Gage’s thoughts…

It was interesting. I liked the information pages in the back that explained everything the best. The illustrations were pretty good. I would recommend to people who like to see how the earth works.

My favorite haiku

nestled in sandstone,

Maiasaura shields her young

fossil family

Gage also read this with it and it provided a bit more fun.

Our book of the day was The Undefeated written by Kwame Alexander and illustrated by Kadir Nelson. Published 2019, 40 pages.

After the success of Kwame yesterday I chose this book today (FYI- I went through many lists for about a week, reserving anything that looked interesting at the library. I have all the books I need to finish up this month and then some, but choose the books on a weekly basis, sometimes switching them up when something like this happens)

I love this book so much. The poem, written by Kwame is perfectly highlighted by the gorgeous illustrations. This might be one I actually buy to have in our library. I read the book to Gage, explaining the things that Kwame was referring to the second time around and then we looked at the list in the back of the book to get more detail about a few of the things and then we watched two Kwame videos where he read the book/poem himself. Then we were able to talk about the way the poem was transformed when read by the poet.

Gage’s thoughts…

This is about black lives matter and it celebrates black people. I liked watching Kwame read it best because he read it with such force.

For our reading time Gage read me Imagine, one I hadn’t put in my stacks because it didn’t look like it had enough to delve into, but after he read it we discovered it was the true story of Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. It was about growing up in the migrant farms and finally going to school and beyond. This was well worth the read.