NCTE Award Poetry

Sidman, Joyce. 2010. Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors. Ill. by Beckie Prange. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. ISBN: 978-0-544-10616-1.

Book Review:

Joyce Sidman is the 2013 winner of the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, established by the National Council of Teachers of English.  In Ubiquitous she joins forces again with illustrator Beckie Prange (after the 2005 Caldecott Honor Book Songs of the Water Boatman) to tell the tale of some of the earth’s hardiest survivors in a book about evolution and the organisms which have thrived in our world.  Sidman combines a variety of poetic forms to describe traits of the organism along with a narrative paragraph on a facing page providing scientific facts about each one.  Prange’s watercolor and linoleum cut illustrations add as much to this outstanding book as the text and are worth poring over leisurely. Ubiquitous was on many Best Book lists, including Outstanding Science Trade Book from the National Science Teachers Association, and was a Cybil Award Finalist in 2010.

The book begins and concludes with end papers showing a graphic visual, in a maze-like format, of the time span from the earth’s creation to the arrival of life along the way, beginning with bacteria and ending with humans.  In between, we learn through Sidman’s poems, and her short informative narratives, about mollusks, lichens, sharks, beetles, diatoms, geckos, ants, grasses, and animals such as squirrels, crows and coyotes.  For each organism Sidman describes characteristics that make it a survivor and the ways in which it benefits our world.

The author’s poems are very diverse, some with text in concrete format such as those describing the bacteria, scarab, shark and squirrel. Others have words spread across the pages representing movement, as in the descriptions of diatoms as they “crash, roar, millions more” across an ocean wave and the dandelions, as their “fairy-hair flees” up the page. A few poems are sly and witty like “Gecko on the Wall,” whose “tail comes off: a wriggling prize/[as]she sprints and leaps and slinks and spies.” Others are quite beautiful and use figurative language such as the alliteration reflected in “The Mollusk That Made You” - “shell of sunrise/sunrise shell/yours is the pink lip/of a pearled world.”

Access features include a glossary of terms used in the book and a detailed author’s note describing the extensive research she undertook in order to write this book, including consulting with biologists, reading scientific articles and many, many books. She lists, as a bibliography, a number of the most informative and eye-opening texts she read.

Sharing the Poetry:

On her website, Joyce Sidman has provided curriculum support for Ubiquitous and ways to incorporate it into the classroom, including discussion questions, writing activities, and science and math lessons. This link provides easy access: (http://www.joycesidman.com/books/ubiquitous-celebrating/ubiquitous-rg.pdf).  There is also a digital trailer available for the book at this link: http://www.joycesidman.com/books/ubiquitous-celebrating/book-trailer-for-ubiquitous.html.

In a poetry unit, a lesson could include the introduction of the poetic form Diamante, which is simple in form (1,2,3,5,3,2,1), but begs for critical thinking in finding eloquent and vivid word choices to make an impact.  Sidman’s poem about bacteria in “First Life” is a great example to show students and get them started. 

Selected Poem:

First Life

(a diamante)

Bacteria

ancient, tiny

teaming, mixing, melding

strands curled like ghostly hands

winking, waving, waking

first, miraculous

Life

References:

Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database. n.d. Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors.” http://ezproxy.twu.edu:4529/index.php/jbookdetail/jqbookdetail?page=1&pos=2&isbn=9780618717194 (accessed February 14, 2014).