If You're Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand: Poems About School

Summary: This is a collection of poems that all relate to school. One in particular is, Is Your Head on Nice and Tight?. This poem is about forgetting and being prepared.
Personal Reaction: This is really good poem that could be used daily in the classroom.
Classroom Extension: This particular poem could be used to remind the students to be prepared. Many of these poems are extremely fun and the students can relate to them.

Children love hearing of trials and tribulations that they face at school but always in the context of it happening to omeone else. This is a collection of poems is all about school and the problems that kids go through during the school years.

This book would be entertaining not only for your begining readers but also for older readers too. The younger kids can sit and listen as the older ones can curl up and read it on their own.

We could utilize this book in an number of ways. We could use it as a read aloud lesson with a group discussion, using this opportunity to talk about things that happen to all of us at some point and time. We could also incorporate this into an English lesson and use it as a guide in having the students write their own poetry using their own experiences as a focal point. ( )

"If You Are Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand" is a great ook that teachers could use in the classroom. This book is filled with 38 poems that capture the excitement, challenges, heartbreaks and the wonder of life in elementary school. These poems help the children to understand rules for the classroom and rules for the entire elementary school. These are poems that can help the children learn how to cope with many things in elementary school.

An extentsion for this book would be to talk about each poem in a group discussion or to journal about each poem and how they would handle each situation that it talked about.

A collection of all the ups, downs, surprises, and daily routines in an elementary school, If You’re Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand, will surely be pleasurable for any young reader. Filled with 38 poems and black and white illustrations on every page, this compilation of poems is a perfect edition in any elementary classroom. Witty and poignant, Dakos gives accurate representations of the challenging and exciting days in any elementary classroom. Filled with animated word pictures, the reader gets a sense of how teachers and students feel and interact in a humorous way. This book would be a great in a classroom or school library, as well as a great resource during poetry units in school. ( )

Ever had a bad day at school? Well, it always helps to laugh about it and this is what Kalli Dakos does through poetic voice in this book. Classroom Use: This would be a great book to prompt children to write about their own troubles at school! ( )