Summary:
Explores and tells you the nasty and terrible things that you can do with bugs in a poetic and rhythmic manner.

Personal Reaction:
May put a child in fear and disgust of bugs, but in a fun and entertaining way. Illustrations are excellent and actually show the reader how children truly see bugs from their own perspective.

Extension Ideas:
A fun and poetic way to introduce bugs. Also, shows how a bug may feel towards us as we explore their world and explore the bugs themselves. ( )

This book is a wonderful lyrical poetry book for children because of different poems on all sorts of bugs that children will find funny and somewhat ridiculous. Compares bugs to other daily items and poetry on all sorts of bugs one would find.

The first thing that I noticed about this book that children would love is all the alliteration, an example from the first page, “Beetles, bedbugs, bottle flies”. Children will enjoy this book because as the textbook mentions, children love rhyming words because of their natural rhythm. As poetry usually does, many verses end in words that rhyme with a few before or after. An example later in the book shows us this “Praying mantis pizza is a culinary must, with lots of extra maggots and a daddy longlegs crust”. There are also a lot of metaphors and similes that are somewhat absurd which children will find very entertaining. “A million maggots in a vase, lice as thick as mayonnaise” is a good example of this and it is very descriptive and children will be able to imagine it (even if it is a picture too).

Children will love this book because of all the fun, rhythmic lyrics verses. “Teach your centipede to fetch, teach her to play dead, teach her to go potty in your mom and daddy’s bed” and “try millipedes for dental floss, feel them scrape away the moss: drop one down your sister’s pants, watch her do the boogie dance” are lines that children will laugh at when they hear it the ridiculousness of the situations the book deals with. This book introduces children to poetry in a fun way! I know I enjoyed it when I read it because of its ridiculousness, comedic poems and is very visual.

I would use this book to teach word choice or voice because this book does a great job at both of those ideas. I would also use this book to teach adjectives since so much of the book is describing the bugs in fun and unordinary ways. ( )