Love That Dog

Love That Dog: a novel by Sharon Creech is a very interesting book that show the year long thoughts of a boy who went from disliking poetry to appreciating poetry and gaining a passion for poetry. I thought the short thoughts of the student were interesting. The way they were written as if his thoughts were poet was a strange way to read the book. I thought that Jack's progression to liking poetry was very realistic. He did not start to like poetry right off the bat. His first entry was about how he didn't want to write poetry because he was a boy and "Girls do." (write poetry). By January he was able to see how poetry could be typed up and the display that made it look more like poetry made him feel that his writing might actually be poetry, and then by the end of the book when his inspirational poet came and talked to his class he really embraced his writing as poetry and he was proud of it.

I think this would be a good book to use when teaching children how poetry can take many forms and can be done by using other poems as inspiration. Good writing comes from reading. As a teacher I would not have my class read this entire book, but use segments of it to teach lessons to my students if we were learning a poetry unit.

I thought this book was interesting and many of Jack's thoughts would be great for teaching while come of Jack's thoughts could be left out of the poetry curriculum.