Jack’s favorite poet, Walter Dean Myers, is actually better known for his young adult novels than for his poetry. Particularly early on in his career, Williams was also very concerned with using distinctly American language (rather than copying what he saw as stuffy British poetry conventions), and it’s possible to see Jack’s clearly childish writing style doing much the same thing.

Williams is most often associated with Imagist poets, whose poetry described everyday objects and happenings. Though Jack isn’t entirely sold on the merits of William Carlos Williams’s famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” critics of Love That Dog have noted that Love That Dog itself is written in a style very reminiscent of Williams’s. Instead, Love That Dog serves as a primer on important 20th-century poets, with “The Tyger” by William Blake a notable exception (Blake is often grouped with Romantic poets and published “The Tyger” in his 1794 poetry collection, Songs of Innocence and Experience). With classic poetry included in the back matter, this provides the perfect resource for teachers and students alike.Jack offers few clues as to when or where exactly he lives (and he shares nothing about what’s going on in his wider world), but the way he mentions learning to type and use the computer suggest the novel takes place about the time it was written, in 2000 or 2001.

Written as a series of free-verse poems from Jack's point of view, Love That Dog shows how one boy finds his own voice with the help of a teacher, a writer, a pencil, some yellow paper, and of course, a dog. With a fresh and deceptively simple style, acclaimed author Sharon Creech tells a story with enormous heart.

Original Publication Date: January 2016Īll products are digital and downloadable.

Writing activity: Writing original poems.

Notes about punctuation, spelling, vocabulary, and literary elements.

4 Passages (one per week) for copywork/dictation.

This guide contains the following features: It’s geared toward children ages 8-11 and is an indispensable tool for parents who want to teach language arts in a natural, literature-bathed context. The Arrow is the monthly digital product that features copywork and dictation passages from a specific read aloud novel (you purchase or obtain the novels yourself).

Love that dog the book