Hip Hop Speaks to Children with CD: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat (A Poetry Speaks Experience)
Hip Hop Speaks to Children with CD: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat (A Poetry Speaks Experience)
NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND INCLUDED IN THE BOOKLIST TOP 10 ART BOOKS FOR YOUTH! Our consensus is Hip Hop Speaks to Children is the most essential poetry purchase to make this year.
The poetry is enough.
The illustrations are enough.
The CD is enough.
Together, this book is a treasure of which you cannot get enough.
We shall accomplish much this year. Children will be encouraged to put their words to poetry and beats. Teachers will be encouraged to allow the artists
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Great book for everyone!,
Hip Hop Speaks to Children is a delightful and enlightening collection of poetry from various Poets, several performed by the authors themselves, on the included audio CD. With beautiful pictures depicting the poems and the contagious beat that the words pound out, this is a collection sure to capture the interest of all ages. Geared toward the 9 – 12 age group, this easily goes beyond that. As an adult, I greatly enjoyed each poem and as I read them out loud to my 6 year old daughter, she bopped around to the rhythm of my voice just reading the words. She was delighted with the rhyming, which easily draws the reader into the words.
While some of the poems within Hip Hop Speaks to Children are fun and playful, others speak of deep emotion. One that I found especially fun is as follows:
Funky Snowman
by: Calef Brown
Funky Snowman loves to dance.
You’d think he wouldn’t
have much chance
without two legs
or even pants
Does that stop
Funky Snowman?
No!!
Turn up the music
with the disco beat,
when you’re in the groove,
you don’t need feet.
Crowds come out
and fill the street.
Kick it.
Funky Snowman!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Another favorite that is more on the serious side and geared toward helping a child’s self esteem, I feel, is as follows:
The Rose that Grew from the Concrete
by: Tupac Shakur
Did u hear about the rose that grew from a crack
in the concrete
Proving nature’s laws wrong it learned 2 walk
without having feet
Funny it seems but by keeping its dreams
it learned 2 breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else even cared!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Loneliness, anger and sadness are feelings that every child knows. More often than not, however, a child is not given or taught an appropriate way to express these strong emotions. The written word is a powerful tool ,that perhaps if given to children, would allow them to positively cleanse themselves and possibly even spark that creative fire that smolders within each soul. Hop Hop Speaks to Children is a positive collection of such emotional expressions. It does not matter what color your skin is, what nationality, race, economic position, size or shape a person is, the written word transcends each and every boundary. With Hip Hop Speaks to Children, you can introduce and excite children to celebrate within the written expression and beat and rhythm of words. I greatly enjoyed this collection and highly recommend it to everyone.
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how the hip hop spoke to me,
This book was a cool book because you could read along with the CD that came with it. The book has many cool poems in it from Ham ‘N’ Eggs to Funky Snowman to Real Life Stuff like accepting who you are and understanding others.
I would suggest this book to people who like poetry with A Beat. One thing that I didn’t like about it was some of the poetry didn’t go with the beat so you thought it was going to the next line and it dosen’t. The poem that I liked most was “From Principal’s Office”. The illustrations in this book were cool.
Joseph the 11 year old critic.
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Rap on, Brothers and Sisters,
Credit Sourcebooks Jabberwocky with knowing a good thing when they see it. When Poetry Speaks to Children came out it was a brilliant collection of poems for kids with an accompanying CD of poets, both alive and deceased, reading their poetry straight out. And in this day and age if you put out a book of poems for kids then it shouldn’t be that much more difficult to put out a book of hip hop and rap as well. Or, as the new collection Hip Hop Speaks to Children calls it, “poetry with a beat.” Collected by the eminently skilled and knowledgeable Nikki Giovanni (activist, poet, multi-award winner, etc.) the book establishes a rock solid connection for kids between the rhythms they hear on their radios and MP3 players and the poetry they encounter in books. Drawing upon both history and contemporary stars (and with an accompanying CD to boot), Giovanni’s collection is the best book of its kind for a younger readership/listenership at this time.
In the introduction to this book “Stories in Rhythm”, Nikki Giovanni writes, “Thirty years ago, kids invented a new sound. They took old music, added their own new poetry, and found a way to have their creative voices heard. The Hip Hop Nation was born, sharing a courageous story of their hopes and promise with the world. And is the world evermore glad.” Right from the start Nikki Giovanni is looking parents, librarians, teachers, and other skeptical adults in the eye and saying that this is important. This matters. This is art. The introduction sweeps through the African and African-American history that led to contemporary Hip Hop. Everything from caps to the Harlem Renaissance to hamboning. Contemporary rap videos with their gold chains and loose ladies? Forget `em. That’s not the real stuff. The raps found in this book have history, humor, and a delicious awareness of the feel of a word. 51 poems/speeches/raps find their way into this collection with an accompanying CD of some of the hip hop, and an in-depth series of small biographies of all the performers.
Watch someone page through the book and make note of their little reactions. How they offer a little “Hmft!” of surprise when they hit the Kanye West selection (a pity THAT’s not on the CD). If they’re a librarian they might coo to finally get to hear Calef Brown (an author/illustrator of whom I’m particularly fond) laying down a track to “Funky Snowman”. And certainly kids of my generation will do a double take when they get to the selection from “Rapper’s Delight”. Plucking out “selections” is how the book gets around a lot of the lines in some songs that might be seen as not entirely kid-friendly. But I don’t think there’s anyone out there who’s gonna object to “i dont mean to brag i dont mean to boast / but we like hot butter on our breakfast toast.” The beauty of the selection is how it works in contemporary names with historical ones. You might turn the page and find yourself getting down to a little Mos Def right before dwelling on some Langston Hughes. It’s not just hip hop artists or poets of the past either. There are people like contemporary poet and children’s author Charles R. Smith whole tackles his own poem “Allow Me to Introduce Myself” on the CD. And I was relieved to find that Ms. Giovanni includes a couple of her own near the end as well.
The selections in here are great too. I’ve heard artist Ashley Bryan do Eloise Greenfield’s “Things” and it’s a poem that rings resoundingly in the ear. A great way to begin any collection, I can tell you. Then to follow it directly up with Jacqueline Woodson’s “Hip Hop Rules the World”, a poem that links the beat with the fact that it really IS poetry, that’s keen. Really, the pairings here can be inspired. Who else would think to put Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” alongside Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”. Both discuss our mortality, one as a disregard for life and one as a full-throttle objection against death. No one has come up with a truly great Harlem Renaissance compendium for children yet, but if they did they might want to take a page out of Hip Hope Speaks to Children so as to determine which selections to choose.
The selected performers are ideal and really there was only one gap that I could see. I was a little surprised not to see any poems or raps by Sonia Sanchez in this book, truth be told. Hip Hop certainly owes as much to Ms. Sanchez’s raw energy and eclectic beats as it does to any Young MC or Tribe Called Quest. Particularly when you take into account Ms. Giovanni’s history with Sanchez, it seems a funny omission in an otherwise encompassing collection. Other missing raps are fine by me. I half-wondered when picking this book up for the first time whether or not Will Smith’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand” would make the cut. Then I…
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Great for younger kids, easy to put in,
The brightness in the photos is exaggerated, it’s about as bright as any led light, but it doesnt POP OUT/GLOW like the picture makes it seem. It’s wearing flexible glowsticks.
It’s awesome for toddlers and young kids who like to go stay out late. I got them for halloween, they’ll be extremely useful for tracking my kids while we’re going from house to house trick-or-treating.
I originally bought these looking for a halloween costume idea, you could probably come up with some Tron-related theme with these laces (alternately, go as retro 90s kid!).
Pretty straightforward to turn on, it has this black rounded driver in the center you turn.
OVERALL: Basically you’re buying flexible glow-sticks, pretty straightforward to turn on, don’t glow brightly, but they all worked. Ships from hong kong (lol “Warm-mart”), so it’ll take 2 weeks or so.
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|great as kids birthday gifts,
i gave them to my nephew who turned 13 yrs.old for his birthday. At first he thought it would be lame, but after he wore them to a night baseball game his friends love them. they flash, strobe and blink different colors. now all my close friends kids have some and the batteries last a long time and are not that exspenceive to replace 4 bucks at CVS
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|Not worth the low price,
It blinks some faint light that is hardly visible in normal in-door lighting. Worth 2 mins of excitement from easily excited kids.
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