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Like radiant colors, you are a shining star"
This children’s book offers an array of entertainment in one small volume. Despite its title, the slim text contains not only poetry but also activities for children. It includes a little over a dozen short poems with smooth, easy rhyme schemes. The poems range in subject, focusing mostly on nature and on children’s lives and dreams, though vehicle enthusiasts will appreciate the multi-page “Cargo Train.” Several poems refer to God and “God’s creation” in a non-denominational manner that can appeal to followers of any religion.
Simple illustrations accompany each poem, with clear lines and no shading, allowing children to use the pictures as coloring pages. Every few pages, there is a mostly blank area for children to draw their own pictures. Sometimes, the text provides a prompt, such as “Create your own rainbow,” after a poem about a rainbow. At other times, it simply urges readers to create their own drawings. Some illustrations accompanying poems contain blank sections, such as an empty thought bubble above a dreaming child with space for readers to draw in their dreams.
In addition to offering pages to create art, the book encourages readers to delve into writing poetry themselves. Two different poems contain blanks for readers to fill in. One offers words as prompts, while the other does not. For instance, in a poem called “I Wish,” the narrator dreams of flying through the sky as a bird. The following pages contain a prompt for readers to write their own “I Wish” poem and to illustrate it. This approach presents a novel way of encouraging young readers to engage with poetry. Treating a book of poetry as an activity book allows them to think of poems as interactive. This unique work could be just the right tool to spark a child’s creativity.