April 14, 2006

Luscious links, or, an Easter basket of treats for adults

Lots of wonderful things to read this weekend:

Stefanie at So Many Books has a terrific piece on the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest, which encourages high school students to memorize and perform great poems, and the recent NPR piece on it. Rather like a poetry bee, in that the state winners wind up in Washington next month to compete nationally. The website includes a Teacher's Guide to download and an extensive online anthology. Poetry Out Loud is sponsored by The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, and state arts agencies. I love the sound of Poetry Out Loud, and especially poetry out loud.

By the way, today's featured poet on the POL website is Donald Hall, and his chosen poem is "Ox-Cart Man", the picture book version of which is one of our very favorite readalouds.

A Fuse #8's review of the day is I'm Not Cute! by Jonathan Allen about a baby owl who would rather be considered a huge, sleek hunting machine rather than cute, which hits very close to home here, where several people would rather be considered big, strong, and brave rather than small, cuddly, and adorable.

Kelly at Big A little a, who celebrated a birthday yesterday, gives a glowing review to the words and pictures (and glossary!) of the new picture book, The Boy Who Loved Words. She also thoughtfully recommends Word Wizard by Cathryn Falwell as "a great readaloud companion."

"Unusual Punctuation and Grammar Lessons", Crissy at Classical Home's list of pet peeves. Crissy also asks that important question, "Si Cuniculus Paschalis sit, unde ova capiat?" (If he's the Easter Bunny, where does he get the eggs?)

And -- this seems an appropriate place to end this post -- Camille at Bookmoot has a round-up of children's books about the Titanic, which sank on this date in 1912.

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