Witch Poems: Themed Poetry Book

This book is a collection of witch poems that have been put together by Daisy Wallace. Some of them do not even have an author. There are 18 poems total in the book and they range in length and level of vocabulary. There is a poem by William Shakespeare, The making of a Charm and even a few from e.e. cummings. While the poems are all about witches, they differ in topics that range from playful to scary. One of the funny poems is by Myra Cohn Livingston, Lazy Witch
Lazy Witch
What's Wrong with you?
Get up and sir your magic brew.
Here's candlelight to chase the gloom.
Jump up and mount your flying broom
And muster up your charms and spells
And wicked grins and piercing yells.
It's Halloween! There's work to do!
Lazy Witch,
What's wrong with you?

The poems make children laugh and put witches in a different light for them; such as the poem Witch Goes Shopping by Liliam Moore. It is a goofy poem about a witch that goes to a regular grocery store looking for "six bats' wings, worm in brine, ear of toads eight or nine, slugs and bugs, snake skins dried, buzzard innards pickled, fried" and becomes frustrated because she can not find any of those things. This would be silly to children because they know that such things would not be found in a grocery store.

This would be a great seasonal book to bring out to work on poetry with the class. The poems are fun, depending on the age group, a few maybe considered on the scary side but those can be skipped. Many different activities can be done in the classroom with poems and if they can be intertwined into the current theme or a relevant holiday such as Halloween in this case, the students will find the poems more engaging. Especially if the poems are fun and goofy. It is hard to get young children interested in serious poems that they can not really relate too. Poems in this book can be read aloud and discussed, the students can draw pictures of what they see while you read them the pictures, some of them can be used to explore rhyme and different aspects of poetry. I could not find any awards this book has won but some of the different authors have been acknowledged for their works, just not the ones in this book. I liked the poems in this book because they are goofy and even so the vocabulary in some of them is too advanced for early childhood education, they can still get the gist of the poems.

Wallace, D. & Schart Hyman, T. (1976). Witch Poems. New York, NY: Holiday House.