Thursday, October 22, 2009

Love that Dog

Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech, is a novel written in poetry. This is the hurtle every literature teacher must go through at some point in their career, convincing boys that poetry is cool and okay to like. The poetry that composes this story is more of a prose or journal entry rather than the conventional notion of what poetry is. I did think that it was a little mellow dramatic about how the boy, Jack, obsessed over the blue car that killed his dog, Sky. It must have been a really recent incident for a young boy to obsess like that, else it seem too dramatic. Other than some skeptical drama, I thought the build up to the blue car was brilliant. I liked the William Blake poem that was included in the student's poetry study, but the rest seemed rather like the traditional Elementary School required poetry reading. I'm secretly glad that Walter Dean Meyer came to see Jack's class, I mean, I know it's a bit unrealistic, but it's a guilty pleasure when the main character does get what they want. I think that I'm going to show this book to my classroom kids to show them another way poetry can develop, and also so they can feel the wonderful rhythm of the way the sentences flow.

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