Yellow Elephant: A Bright Bestiary (Boston Globe-Horn Book Honors (Awards))

I really enjoyed reading the poetry in this book. It is not typical rhyming poetry and I think it could teach children a lot about what makes a poem a poem. I particularly liked how the poems held some true elements but then had the animals doing silly things as well.

This book is great for early poetry. It shows that poems can be something other than rhyming and can be unexpectedly familiar. The author/illustrator do an amazing job creating a fun and entertaining mood with the use of brilliant colors. Children will be amused by each animals change through light

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and motion.

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How many people can actually say they understand the various meanings of words? I do not mean literal, but the feeling and emotion one experiences when they see or read a color, for example. In the "Yellow Elephant: A Bright Bestiary," a book of poetry, it helps one develop the sense of words. In

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particular, it helps one realize how color can effect a person by seeing it or reading the word that describes the it. Colors can mean a variety of different things, like warm and inviting, to angry and frustrated. Children need to be able to make these emotional connections with words while reading, and one way to help children develop this sense is to read the "Yellow Elephant: A Bright Bestiary."

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The illustrations were very beautiful. They also had a theme of colors and animals. Each animal had their own color for example the yellow elephant and the purple puppy.

This book is a book of poems about animals and colors and associating colors and animals together that are not usually associated with each other. These Poems would be good to read to a class especially kindergarten or first grade when they start to associate colors and start to read.

Some poems rhyme, others don’t, in this simple, enjoyable collection of poems that combine an animal with a color (“Gray mama goose in a tizzy, honk-honk-honking herself dizzy”). The poems that don’t rhyme are equally engaging, as with “Green Frog”: “One hop and her green is gone. See

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how she swims, blue frog now under blue water.”
The poems are very short—perfect for an introduction to poetry for young students, from which one can sample different poetic elements. Besides the occasional rhyming, there are examples of alliteration (“Purple Puppy”), onomatopoeia (“’Who?’ asks the white owl, all eyes. ‘Who?’”) and repetition (“Pink collar. Pink bell. Pink pillow. Pink bowl.”). Several of the poems create sensory images for children, though mostly involving sight and sound. “Orange Giraffe” opens with “Orange sun rising over the savanna—Can you see the orange water over the Juba River?” and then “Can you hear the hyena’s high orange laugh?”

The vocabulary is very accessible to young students, as are occasional similes and metaphors. For example, the poem about a brown mouse describes its skittering all around “like she’s jitterbugging on tinfoil.” The integration of Julie Paschkis’s (Glass Slipper Golden Sandal) lovely illustrations with the text produces a very satisfying package for students’ first experiences with this genre. Target audience grades 1-3.

Larios, J. H., & Paschkis, J. (2006). Yellow elephant: A bright bestiary. Orlando: Harcourt.

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Larios accompanies the poems with inaccurately, yet beautifully, colored animals. Children will admire the pictures, as well as the style of poetry. This collection could be used to teach children about literary elements and terms, such as onomotopoeia, alliteration, line breaks, white space, and

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rhyme scheme.

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In this book of poems, every poetry is about a different color and animal. For example, Gold Finch and Pink Kitty. In each of the poems it describes characteristics of each animal.

This book would be good for young students learning animals and colors. The poems are all very simple, so it could be

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used for examples when just learning about poetry.

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Of all of the poetry books, I read this term, I think this one has my favorite illustrations, warm and bright colors are combined in this book. The poems are simple but fun.

This is a good book to read to a child who uses their imagination. Various animals are poetically illustrated in the usual way we think of the animal, and then through poems we are shown the same animal in a different color. I like the concept and the illustrations.