Cursed with Verse for Better or Worse: Science Verse by Jon Scieszka

After twisting the tail of the traditional tale in The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and The Frog Prince, Continued (Picture Puffin), and messing with our minds in Math Curse,Jon Scieszka turns his talents to the wide world of science with his parody of poesy, Science Verse (Golden Duck Awards. Picture Book (Awards).)

Zapped with the curse of "science verse," a formerly bored student finds respite in turning the tenets of science into parodies of famous poems and verses. Here's his black humor version of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, as the class contemplates the science of the black hole:

TWINK

Twinkle-less, twinkle-less
Spot of black,
In the starry
Zodiac.
Suck in all
Matter and light,
Turning sunshine into night.

Twinkle-less, twinkle-less
LOST CONTROL.
Now we're trapped in
The black hole.

Then there's the spoof of human physiology, with apologies to Joyce Kilmer's "Trees, which begins

"I think I ain't never seen
A poem ugly as a spleen!"

And then there's this salute to the oft recycled "second grade, third grade, fourth grade" dinosaur unit, set to the stenorous tones of "The Raven:"

"It's still a mystery, scientists say,
Why the dinosaurs went away.
But I know why they couldn't stay,
And it wasn't meteors,
It was creatures--yes, those teachers,
Who did the work of fifty wars,
And bored to death...
The DINOSAURS."

For teaching across that curriculum gap between science and language arts, you can't beat Science Verse (Golden Duck Awards. Picture Book (Awards).) Or to borrow Scieszka's shtick...

For linking poetry and science,
For theories packed with wry nuance,
You could do a whole lot worse
Than John Scieszka's Science Verse.