A Spectacular Selection of Sea Critters: Concrete Poems

by: Betsy Franco
illustrations by: Michael Wertz (2015)

In this book you will encounter everything from dolphins to octopuses and sea turtles or sharks and squirrel fish. This book of poems is about a wide range of spectacular sea critters. Each page is a different sea critter. The poems are shaped to look like the animals and objects they are talking about. The book is informative about the different animals. This book describes the animals and what the interact with in the sea. Although this book has a lot of information and is fun to read, it is not very easy to read. This book would not be easy for an elementary school student to read. The way the words are formatted does not make it easy to follow.

I would like to have this book in my classroom, but I would not have it in lower level classrooms. I would introduce this book before I would have it in the classroom library. I would introduce the book with a selection of poems to read aloud and then have it open for student to read. I think that most student would like to read it. It is very appealing to the eye when you do not get distracted by the formatting of the poems.

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