Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Tag!

As Roger reports, PoetryTagTime is a new ebook-only anthology of 30 original, interrelated poems. Each distinguished children's poet "tags" the next poet in line, connecting each poem topically (moon to sun, sun to sunflower, etc.) to the ones before and after it. The PoetryTagTime Tips blog offers ideas for sharing the poems with kids one-on-one or in a classroom setting.

The 30-poem collection is just the right length for sharing a poem a day during National Poetry Month, but with contributors including Douglas Florian, Calef Brown, Lee Bennett Hopkins, and Nikki Grimes, it's sure to be a hit with budding poets and poetry lovers any time.

And April's not over yet! For more poetry, check out Roger's post about Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out and Read and the recommended poetry booklist on our website.

—Katie Bircher

8 comments:

  1. I'm so happy to be part of Poetry TagTime, in the company of poets I love and in a cool e-book form. Poetry and e go nicely hand in hand. And this was a great opportunity for me to finally download Kindle to my computer so that I could buy TagTime and other e-books.

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  2. Wow, we feel as if we have made The Big Time with a nod at Horn Book! Thanks so much for the kind words for our book and blog. We're trying to use every possible means to get more poems in the hands of more kids. Thanks again!
    Sylvia

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  3. An eBook of 30 original poems for 99 cents is quite a bargain. We hope that poetry lovers everywhere will download PoetryTagTime to enjoy wherever they go. I loved the game of it, too. Playing poetry tag is great fun. I heartily recommend it for the classroom or at home. David

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  4. I loved playing "tag" too, David. It is a wonderful poetry game for any classroom, from elementary to adult, and the e-book format makes this model accessible to everyone!

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  5. Thank you, Katie! I'm glad that you liked the 30-poem length. The choice of 30 days was primarily a play-on-words choice. We'd been toying with 28 or 29 poets (for phases of the moon; originally we'd fancied a moon theme). We switched to 30 because Sylvia Vardell's first language was German, and since "Tag" means "day" in German, and there are 30 days in April . . . (I've joked with Greg Pincus of Gotta Book that soon people will think poetry can only be done in increments of 30 poets, so it's great to see "100 Poems to Rip Out and Read"!)

    The PoetryTagTime project was so much fun to work on because of the camaraderie in the children's poetry community. We were lucky to have 30 poets who were willing to drop everything to write a poem within a day of being "tagged."

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  6. Contributing to this project was great fun. Instead of being brought kicking and screaming into the world of eBooks, I got to play tag. Thanks Sylvia & Janet.

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  7. Always a pleasure to dive into projects when Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell are at the helm. And what a fab project it is! If I were a dog, I'd be wagging my tail about it!

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  8. It's all been said, and so well!
    It was great fun, and we all love the nod
    from Horn Book. Honored to take part,
    tag, and be tagged!
    Rebecca

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