40 Poems for 40 Weeks: Integrating Meaningful Poetry and Word Ladders into Grades 3-5 Literacy

Hi everyone,

Today TIM RASINSKI and I hope to wrap up the last loose ends of our upcoming book with Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 40 Poems for 40 Weeks: Integrating Meaningful Poetry and Word Ladders into Grades 3-5 Literacy. The book, which is designed with elementary school librarians in mind, was inspired by ANGELA KNIGHT (librarian at David Harrison Elementary), who has been reading a poem a week to students there since January 2023. When Angela told me what she was doing, I knew at once that I wanted to do a book — a collection of poems really — that would encourage other elementary school librarians across the country to read at least one poem a week to the kids in their school.

In the field of education books, nearly all are written with classroom teachers in mind. Our book is for teachers, too, as well as parents at home, but the main intention is to reach librarians with the idea and resources to provide valuable assistance to teachers and their students up and down the halls in their schools. Angela herself wrote the foreword for the book and the introduction was written by SYLVIA VARDELL, Professor emerita, Children’s Literature, School of Library and Information Studies, Texas Woman’s University .

Each of the 40 highly-acclaimed poets in the book (who collectively have had more than 1,000 books published) is given four pages, one each for a photograph, a kid-friendly bio, a poem, and a word ladder created by Tim, who is famous for it. A reading list in the back, provided by the poets themselves, includes more than 120 recent titles of outstanding collection of children’s poetry.

40 Poems for 40 Weeks: Integrating Meaningful Poetry and Word Ladders into Grades 3-5 Literacy is due out in December. I’ll let you know when it goes up on Amazon.