Julie Larios’s “Song of the Hog”

Reminder: PoetryTagTime is the first ever electronic-only poetry anthology of new poems by top poets for children. You can purchase the book for 99 cents at Amazon and read it on your Kindle or through the downloadable Kindle platform for your computer, cell phone, etc.

Previously: David L. Harrison

Next up: JULIE LARIOS

Setting the Stage: Invite the kids to share any pig-related words or phrases they may know. Share some of these from the poem: pig, hog, grunt, mud, muck, snout, runt, swine, lout, curly tail, pink, squeal, pork, porcine. Look them up together if these words are unfamiliar.

Poetry Performance: Ask the kids to choose whether they want to be the “hog” or the “runts” in reading the parts of Julie Larios’s “Song of the Hog” poem. The “runties” read the designated lines in quotation marks:

“O, Rotund One! O, Royal Swine!
You are the barnyard’s Master Lout.
We’re curly-tailed and pink and squealy,
but you are the Porcine King, no doubt!”

The “hog” readers read the rest of the poem. Try it and then switch parts to read again. [Be sure to read it aloud first in its entirety to provide a model of how to pronounce “ferocious,” “runties,” “rotund,” and “Porcine,” for example.]


Just for Fun: Feeling outrageous? Invite the kids to copy the poem onto a pink piece of paper, outline the poem with a pig shape, then splatter it all with mud! Let dry and display. Research and show the kids the famous painting of the hog by American artist Jamie Wyeth that inspired Larios’s poem.

Poem Links: Here are key words that connect this poem with other poems in the PoetryTagTime collection:
Dialogue
Hog
Food
Humor
Body

Buy the book now, so you can share each poem along with the ideas and activities that follow here.

Next up for PoetryTagTime: Ann Whitford Paul

Image credit: PoetryTagTime

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2011. All rights reserved.