I have spent a large part of my life with young children as an Elementary teacher; and I credit many rewarding experiences in the classroom, especially the topics I taught in first grade, as the inspiration for the poems that I have included in my book. When summer vacation was over the first year I retired, I realized I didn’t need to get up and go into school. But I would sit anyway, and say to myself, “Well, this month I’d be teaching this, and next month I’d be covering that . . . ” Pretty soon I was jotting down topics and phrases on paper and asking my husband, “What rhymes with . . . ?” About 4 or 5 hours later I had the rough draft for a poem. Before I realized it, I had a floor full of crumpled up papers just about every night during the Winter months covering Science and Health lessons, holidays, fire safety, dental health, dinosaurs, animals – many of the concepts I had taught in my classroom. After that, I started drawing the pictures to accompany each poem. This process took a whole lot longer for me than the writing part and I had twice as many garbage can loads of rough sketches as the poems themselves. However, I am pleased with the way my illustrations turned out, considering that I am not an artist. Finally, I had 33 poems and pictures all in a neat pile! So, I put them in a binder and shared them with my family, who said they were fantastic. Then, I put them in a drawer and there they stayed for a few months. I thought, “What good are they if no one else gets to read the poems and see the pictures?” So, I asked my daughter if she would type the poems for me, and I made the big decision to send them out to get published. The final result is “Butterflies, Bears, and Other Poems for Children.”
