This poetry book made me wish I could read and understand Spanish. It was a beautifully written and illustrated bilingual collection of poems about animals. I loved all of the words included in the background of the illustrations as well. It was fun to read and would be so great to use during Poetry Month in April or really anytime you are studying poetry.

Berry loves when I read to her in Spanish and I love the practice! This book offers that, as well as complete understanding since the poems appear in both English and Spanish. The illustrations are the real wonder. Beautifully crafted with additional bilingual adjectives about the subjects of the poems. They are wonderful.

Gorgeously illustrated book of poems in both Spanish and English. Fascinating afterword that tells about Julie Paschkis' writing process. Word lovers will pore over the illustrations and soak up new words in both English and Spanish.

From Ali
****

From Saffron:
****

Some lovely, some not my speed, my Spanish isn't good enough to review it properly. The art is charmng, the cat and whale both being fat irks me.

I found several of these interesting, so maybe 3.5, but I am not a poetry person and was not struck with how to use these besides displaying with bilingual books.

This book, on the 2016 list of notable poetry books selected by a NCTE committee, is a bilingual anthology of animal poems. Each page features a different animal with a poem in English and Spanish. The poems are not completely direct translations, but rather ones that keep the meaning the same despite not using the exact same words. In the author’s note, she explains that the always wrote first in Spanish and then English because her English is “more flexible.” The pictures are gorgeous, and full of other words that describe the scene. This book would be great to read at any age in elementary, but I think would be excellent to use in talking about imagery in poetry at the higher end of the elementary school. An especially great choice for a bilingual or ESL classroom.

Ah, Julie Paschkis. One of my all-time favorite illustrators. And in this gorgeous picture book, she wrote all the poems, too - in two languages! Some of them just sang out to me. Others didn't. She wrote them first in Spanish, then translated to English. Her illustrations are luscious. A feast for the eyes. The few poems that weren't fives for me sounded GREAT in Spanish, even though I couldn't understand a word!

Lovely poems in English and Spanish, not exact translations but capture the essence and needs of both languages, fun in that it also has other words that are part of the illustrations too and the page break divides the languages.

There is a lot to look at in this book and yet, it's not overwhelming. I'm not a poetry person, but I really enjoyed the text, as well as the layout and look of the book.