Doodle Soup

by John Ciardi, Illus. by Merle Nacht

  • Genre: Poetry
  • Readability: ages 8 and up – can be read aloud to 5 year olds and up
  • A few themes: being silly, friendships, adventures, having fun
  • A few uses: read aloud, choral reading, Teaching: poetry, rhyming words…

Doodle Soup is a compilation of hilarious and silly poems by John Ciardi. I enjoyed reading the poems in this book to my class. It emphasizes that it’s nice to be a kid, and that you should never grow up. The poems also are quite simply written, so if you rewrote them on chart paper, the class could read it all together.

Some themes covered in this book: being silly, having fun, friendships, being adventurous

Activity

  1. Read poems out of Doodle soup.
  2. Ask children to remember rhyming words from the poems.
  3. When finished the pome write down the rhyming words on a piece of chart paper.
  4. Cut these words out and start a rhyming word bulletin board that kids can add to whenever they find new rhyming words in anything they read or hear