Blog Entry #12

Fireflies at Midnight

By Marilyn Singer

Pictures by Ken Robbins

Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2003

28 pages

Poetry

 

I chose this book of poetry, because it is interesting and the pictures are nice. Plus, I saw several things that could be discussed and taught from this book. Fireflies at Midnight is a collection of poems about different mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, and amphibians that you would see from one dawn to the next dawn. The whole book cycles through a twenty-four hour day, using each poem for a different time of day, and there is a poem about the creatures you may see at these times of day. There is a poem about a robin at dawn, a horse at noon, an ant in early afternoon, a monarch butterfly for mid afternoon, a rabbit at dusk, a bat at dark, a firefly at midnight, a red fox at night time, a mole at dawn, and many more.

The medium of this book is photography, and photographic treatments are used for the illustrations. I really cannot tell you what a photographic treatment does, but I will tell you that these photographs do not look like normal photographs. The colors in the photographs look very bright, some of them look blurry or splotchy, and they have a very different look and feel to them. The treatments give the photographs a rough-textured look. The colors in Fireflies at Midnight are bright and the pictures are very interesting. The pictures look real, but they almost look like painted illustrations at the same time.

          I believe this book would be appropriate for second grade level and up. Of course, the teacher would need to read, model, teach, and explain many elements to the lower elementary grades. This book may be more appropriate for upper elementary grades for independent reading material. The vocabulary in the poems is not very complex but contains deep meaning, and this encourages a higher order of thinking from the students. The poems in this book would be great for teaching rhyme and rhythm, alliteration, assonance, consonance, poetic form, and lyrical poetry in a lesson. Those elements previously mentioned provide enough material to teach poetry for multiple lessons. This book has no awards or honors.