My House Is Singing

by Betsy Rosenthal, Margaret Chodos-Irvine (Illustrations)

Has your smoke detector ever tattled on you when you burned the toast? Does your sticky back door get the best of you? Do you have a secret hideaway where you keep your private treasures? Told from a child's perspective, the poems in this affectionate collection celebrate everything that makes each house a unique and special place.

From waking up in a cozy bedroom on a chilly morning to exploring a garage full of fascinating junk, this intimate house tour proves there's no place like home.

Genres: Poetry

40 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2004

Reviews

[Emily Sammartino · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little girl goes through all the little things, living and not, that makes up her home. Reading this poetry book, I felt an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. She describes each thing in her home as if it were alive and talking, from a welcome mat to the vacuum cleaner her family uses. It brought me back to my childhood, when I was little and would make up these grand stories and everything seems so much more magical. The author really captures what a home is and what it can mean to the person in it. The illustrations and the way that some words are formed into what they are describing adds to the carefree childlike mood that the story creates. This would be a great book to read in a classroom when introducing poetry and poetic devices as there are many throughout

[Amy Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of poems is written about things around the house from the perspective of a child. Most of the poems are fairly short, however easy to comprehend. My favorite is "the sock eater," a poem about the dryer as a sock thief. The illustrations are very vibrant and add to the richness of the poems. Some poems are written it a particular shape, like the one about the pictures on the wall is written in the shape of a frame. It is a book I would use in my early elementary classroom to teach students about poetry.