By Shel Silverstein
Silverstein's second big one: around a hundred and thirty-five short poems, silly and rhyming and every so often a little wicked, including 'Whatif,' the one where a child lies awake at night while every worry lines up to introduce itself.
If Where the Sidewalk Ends won your class over, this is the companion, and it holds up. Around a hundred and thirty-five poems, all short, all with Silverstein's scratchy ink drawings sitting right in the middle of them. 'Whatif' is a child in bed at night as the whatifs crawl in and line up: whatif I flunk that test, whatif green hair grows on my chest. 'Messy Room' lists off a disaster of a bedroom and then turns on you in the last line. 'How Not to Have to Dry the Dishes' offers exactly the advice the title promises. There's a table of contents you can hand a child so they pick their own poem by the title alone.
The reason to own both Silversteins rather than one is that this book reaches somewhere the first doesn't. It's still funny and still a little wicked, but 'Whatif' and a handful like it are quietly about being a person, and an older child may feel that difference without anyone naming it. For a class it's about as practical as poetry gets: short poems, a contents page full of jokes, a picture on every page, and a child who picks their own poem out of the list has mostly already decided to read it. Silverstein's rhythm is so firm you can hand a poem to a nervous reader and the meter will carry them through.