Title: Tap Dancing on the Roof: Sijo (Poems)
Author: Linda Sue Park (illustrated by Istvan Banyai)
About the Author: Park is the author of a Newbery Medal (Single Shard). She lives in Rochester, NY. She is daughter of Korean immigrants. Park has been writing poems and stories since she was four years old, and her favorite thing to do as a child was read. When she was nine years old she published a poem in a magazine and was paid one dollar for it. She continued to write poems during elementary and high school. She went to Stanford University and obtained a degree in English. She met a man and moved to Dublin. Park started a family there and then moved back to the U.S. She taught ESL to college students in Dublin and continued when she moved to the U.S. She finally realized that she wanted to write books for children.
Age Level: 5-8
Synopsis: A sijo, a traditional Korean verse form, has a fixed number of stressed syllables and a humorous or ironic twist at the end. Like haiku, sijo are brief and accessible, and the witty last line winds up each poem with a surprise. The verses in this book illuminate funny, unexpected, amazing aspects of the everyday—of breakfast, thunder and lightning, houseplants, tennis, freshly laundered socks. Carefully crafted and deceptively simple, Linda Sue Park's sijo are a pleasure to read and an irresistible invitation to experiment with an unfamiliar poetic form. Istvan Banyai's irrepressibly giddy and sophisticated illustrations add a one-of-a-kind luster to a book that is truly a gem.
Theme(s): poetry, sijo
How it can be used in the elementary classroom: This would be a great book to do a poetry unit with. The teacher can teach students how to create sijo poems. This book is full of fun and interesting examples of Sijo poetry, but there is also an explanation of the sijo poem and tips for writing your own. Tap Dancing on the Roof can be read as a class and then the students can experiment writing their own sijo poems. The whole class could write and illustrate their poems and compile a book and each student could have a copy. There could be a unit that combines sijo and haiku poetry that could involve reading examples of the poetry and creating their own.
Barnes and Noble
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