EMPATHY in animal poems: if you’re discussing empathy with your class, many of the poems in SQUEAK! SQUAWK! ROAR! could help. With animals rather than people as the focus, their feelings are a step away from us and less painful or personal to discuss.
Take ‘Exhibit No. 42’ for instance, or ‘Hungry Hedgehog’ – snippets below. Discuss the animal’s plight and suffering, then invite children to compare them, if they wish, to those sometimes suffered by people. Discuss how we could support the animal, then the person.
(Please note, these quotes show only selected parts of the poems.)
Other poems in the book offering a starting point for empathy study include ‘Who’s the Unclucky One?’, ‘Elephant’, ‘Elephantine Problem’ and ‘Jungle Shrink’, as well as ‘Who? Me?’ (illustration below) and more.
Kate Williams 
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