National Poetry Month is only two weeks away. Make sure you have a copy of Let’s Dance by Valerie Bolling on your shelves to share with your students. Let’s Dance is a rhyming text that celebrates different dances from all over the world. In addition to portraying children from various cultures, Let’s Dance includes children who are differently abled as well as non-binary children. Valerie uses onomatopoeia on every page. This book would be a great book to add to a writer’s workshop basket with a figurative language label.
In my interview with Valerie on Chalk + Ink, Valerie talks about while it’s important to have books with diverse characters, it’s the conversations teachers are willing to have about racism and implicit biases that create change.
For writer’s workshop, Valerie suggests encouraging students to use a copy and paste revision technique. Look at a portion of their writing and then copy and paste it and try that same sentence in another space in the manuscript. So, if there is a powerful sentence at the end of the manuscript, try it in the beginning or the middle. Then, read each version of the manuscript aloud to see where the sentence works best.
I’m excited to share Let’s Dance with my students in April and look forward to having it live in my writer’s workshop basket all along.
Good bye, March! Hello April!
