Bibliographic Citation:
Prelutsky, Jack. 2006. Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant. New York, NY: Greenwillow Books. ISBN: 9780060543174.
Review:
Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant is a fun, zany book of poetry about animal/object combinations. The animals vary from Alarmadillos to Panthermometers to Zipperpotamuses. Prelutsky's creativity shines through with this collection of 17 poems. All of them are silly and have a great rhyme. As you read each of these poems, you can't help but read them with a rhythmic beat. Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant is a great introductory poetry book to share with students. Prelutsky makes poetry fun and something that students will want to check out. My favorite poem was, "The Bizarre Alarmadillos", a combination of a armadillo and a alarm clock. This poem does a great job appealing to the senses and as you are reading the poem you can almost hear the alarms going off. Below is a excerpt from this poem:
When they push their panic buttons,
buzzers buzz and beepers beep.
Brass alarms clang ever louder,
It's no wonder they can't sleep.
Can't you just hear the alarms ringing?
Prelutsky's ingenious poems are great for both adults and children. Carin Berger's illustrations are just as creative as the poems. Berger's pictures are bold and accurately describe what is being written about in Prelutsky's poems. The illustrations have a whimsical feeling and have a vintage look. The pictures are appealing to the eye and are sure to draw in the young readers attention. I really enjoyed this book as a whole and think it would be a great book to share in the classroom. It's amazincredible (amazing + incredible)!
Spotlight Poem:
The Tweasels of the Forest
The TWEASALS of the forest
Are considerate and sweet.
But unless they're busy tweezing,
They feel somehow incomplete.
They walk and walk around the woods
Upon a constant quest
For shrubs and trees that need a tweeze-
It's tweezing they do best.
The TWEASALS are well-meaning.
And they always try to please.
When anything needs tweezing.
They immediately tweeze.
They tweeze with great dexterity.
Facility, and flaire-
As long as tweezing's called for,
All the TWEASALS will be there.
Activity:
Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant is a great book to use when teaching about visualization. I used this book with my second graders. I read the poems to the students and had them visualize what the animals looked like using the clues from the poem. After they had time to share their thoughts with a neighbor, I would show them the picture and see if it matched to the picture in their head. The students had so much fun doing this, they wanted me to keep going! This book has so many teaching points in it that I would highly encourage teachers to add this book to their personal classroom library.
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