This is a wonderful anthology of poems about colors. The author brings colors to life by describing to the reader how colors make her feel and what they remind her of. She personifies the colors by giving them humanistic attributes like green being greedy. She also tells how the colors sound, look like, smell and taste like.

I love this book because it invokes all the senses. You can actually hear smell and taste the different colors as she describes them.

One extension idea I would use in the classroom would be to give each student a card with the name of a color on it and ask them to tell the class what that color sounds, smells, tastes, looks, and feels like to them. I cold also have them use the same cards and point to things around the room that are the same color to show them how color is an intricate part of our world and our everyday life and how the vision impared cannot see the colors and so we must find other ways to describe to them the colors we get to see everyday.

Twelve poems reflect the author's feelings about various colors.

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This is a good example of poetry. It is a collection of poems that describe the colors. They are individual poems brought together at the beginning and end by a book end poem. These poems have amazing rhythm.
Media: water color ( )

Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Color is a fun walk through the different colors of the universe. O’Neil begins and ends this collection of poetry with a poem that describes all colors as living entities that affect the world. Throughout the book, each poem brings it assigned color to life. You do not read about the colors, you see, hear, smell and feel them.
Even though this book is as old as I am, I think it could be considered timeless because colors, like people, do not really change. I thought it was fun to read and I caught myself saying “yes, that is the best way to describe that.” In the poems, “What is Blue?” and “What is Black?” the author’s use of figurative language reveals the true personalities of these colors. Both colors have preconceived notions about them, but O’Neil shows the reader there is good and bad in all.
This book would be great to use as an extension to a unit on colors. Whenever a new color was to be introduced, the teacher could read that poem.
There are several poems that offer opposites, such as “What is Blue?” After reading and discussing the poem, the students would work with opposite cards at center, pairing cards with their opposites. ( )

Hailstones and Halibut Bones is a series of poems focusing on many differnt colors. These poems have a sense of rythum and rhyme to them. They talk about all different objects and emotions that have to deal with that color. After reading each poem you as the reader can just feel the colors taking over your body and your imagination running wild with the ideas that the author puts in your head.

I related to this book in an unusal way,because it made my mind wonder what other things could go along woth that color. Another fact i thought was intreating was that i linked some of the things that the author was talking about back to memories that I have had.

One of my classroom extension is going to be have each student do a poem about their favorite color. Also i am going to have the students do an illstration about that color with out using that color and going to have my other students guess what color the students were trying to show. ( )