RED SINGS FROM TREETOPS: A YEAR IN COLORS by Joyce Sidman

Sidman, Joyce. 2009. Red Sings from Tree Tops: A Year in Colors. Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780545289788 

This volume has been sitting pristinely on my school shelf for five years.  I confess I have not appreciated it previously as I do now.  This volume needs to be savored like a smooth and rich crème brulee.  Being a kindergarten teacher, time to savor anything is usually impossible.  But I am going to give this lovely book another try. 

Joyce Sidman, our current NCTE Poetry Award winner, published this volume in 2009.  The illustrator, Pamela Zagarenski won a Caldecott Honor Award for her inspired art work.  Every word and every picture is a sensory extravagance. 

About this time in the school year, I do a unit on seasons.  This book is my new favorite to introduce each.  Sidman cleverly personifies the colors, giving them personalities and different characteristics for each season.  For example, in spring green is “shy,” in summer it’s “queen,” in fall it’s “tired,” and in winter it “shrinks.” 

You would not want to share this book without the pictures, but it would be fun to have the kids close their eyes and tell what red object comes to mind when you read this poem:

Red splashes fall trees, 

seeps into

every vein

of every five-fingered leaf.

Red swells

on branches bent low.

Red: crisp, juicy crunch!

How many students think of red maple leaves in the first half of the poem and how many think of apples when they hear “Red swells/on branches bent low?”

Again, ask your students what they see in their minds when they hear this:

In fall,

Yellow grows wheels

and lumbers

down the block,

blinking:

Warning—classrooms ahead.

The illustration of a school bus will solve the riddle if needed.

All of these unrhymed verses are meticulously crafted by Sidman’s characteristic talent for creative word imagery.  Don’t miss it!