Joyful Noise: Poem for Two Voices, by Paul Fleischman

Specifics
Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, by Paul Fleischman, Illustrations by Eric Beddows
Published by Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988

Target Audience
Lexile level NP
We used this book as a book for fifth grade and up, because of the difficulty of reading with two people at once, and writing their own poems.

Summary
This book is a collection of poems, each one about a different type of insect. Each poem has two columns, meant to be read at the same time by two different readers. The columns usually have one line in common to connect the readers to each other. It is a great tool for teaching about many different types of insects, and how they live.

Evaluation
Though some of the text may be harder to understand because it will be being read together, this book can be very helpful in getting students to read aloud, because they won't be doing it by themselves. The author's use of assonance and repetition can be discussed in how they show how the insects live or make sounds. The structure of each poem can be evaluated, discussing why the author chose that specific structure for each poem.

Lesson
The lesson for this book is for each students to be in pairs and choose an animal to write a poem about. They could write about two different types of this animal, they could write about a couple, like the poem Book Lice was about, or they could compare and contrast two different characters. The students can then present their poem to the class together. This will be a lesson on comparing and contrasting two similar but different things, and it will be a lesson in writing poetry.