STAMPEDE! by Laura Purdie Salas

Salas, Laura Purdie. STAMPEDE. Ill. Steven Salerno. New York: Clarion Books, 2009. ISBN 9780618914883.

With eighteen fun and insightful poems transcending the school year, this delightfully written and illustrated children’s poetry collection truly exemplifies what quality poetry can be to children.  The author uses the familiar subject of animals in each of the pieces and draws parallels in the habits and inclinations of the animals to those of the typical school occurrences. This fun and light-hearted collection will be relatable to the students with such subjects as the confusion of the hallways (“New Mouse”), shyness (“Nesting”), and even ravenous hunger at lunchtime (“Here, Boy”).  Children will be drawn to the fun illustrations with many of the human characters being morphed together with the animals used for comparison.  What child hasn’t wanted to fly in the sky or even dig a deep tunnel to somewhere?  This book allows them to connect with their imagination and build on the knowledge and understandings they already possess. 

A favorite piece from the book is the final poem and the book title’s namesake, “Stampede!”

The last bell rings.

We spill outside,

like captives finally freed.

We’re thundering, fumbling

elephants—

after-school stampede.

The piece connects to the students with the familiarity of the end of the day release from school.   All the stored energy and self-restraint can be released in the mass exodus at the end of the day.  Rich description is build with the simile “like captives finally freed” and metaphor such as, “We’re thundering, fumbling elephants—“ to pull the reader into the piece.

To introduce the piece, students could share their feelings and experiences about the end of school day.  It could then be expanded to include how they feel at the end of the day before spring break and the end of the day on the very last day of school.  This will offer students an opportunity to access prior knowledge and allow for a deeper connection to piece.  Each of the pieces contains strong poetic elements such as repetition, rhyme scheme, simile, metaphor, and personification.  This is a great opportunity for the teacher to integrate these elements into the lesson and begin building the foundations for increased critical analysis and close reading strategies.  A fun follow-up activity may be to give students a variety of scenarios and have them brainstorm animals they are similar to in those situations.  They could then pick a favorite and write a poem about the scenario complete with there own illustration of themselves as the animals.