Pets Add Life, a non-profit awareness campaign about the joys of pets, is sponsoring a poetry contest for 3rd-8th graders. This is the eighth year for the contest, and teachers, if your student wins for his or her grade level, you win a $1,000 grant for either pet-related education or a classroom pet. Cool!
I love poetry about animals! I wrote Fuzzy-Fast Blur: Poems About Pets, which includes poems in all sorts of forms about many different animals. Reading this in class could get your students primed up for some pet poem writing. Here’s one of the poems from it:
Flat-Out Ferret
bundle of energy
slick streak of fur
I race and I climb
a fuzzy-fast blurI burrow, I chew things
I crawl and I leap
exhaustion takes overI’m
ready
to
…–by Laura Purdie Salas
There are non-rhyming poems in the book, too–great for mentor texts!
Two more favorite pet-related poetry books:
Oh, Theodore: Guinea Pig Poems, by Susan Katz
Won Ton: A Cat Tale Told in Haiku, by Lee Wardlaw
The contest deadline is January 31, 2016, so you have plenty of time to incorporate this into your classroom curriculum. Good luck!