Greenfield, E. Night on Neighborhood Street. Illus. Jan Spivey Gilchrist. New York, NY: Dial Books for Young Readers.
Brief Annotation: This book of poems tells the stories of the people who live in an urban, African American neighborhood. The poems range in subjects from the birth of a child, to sleepovers, to abandoned homes and drug dealers.
Genre: Poetry
Grade Level: 1-5
Readers who will like this: Students who enjoy great poetry. Students who live in inner city communities. Students who like poems about people.
Response/Rating (1-4): 4 I really enjoyed this book. I loved how Greenfield approaches so many different and often difficult issues in one book. She doesn’t shy away from hard things just because she’s writing for children, but she also doesn’t sound patronizing or victimizing when she deals with these subjects. I think there are so many great conversations that classes could have about the poems in this book and there are also so many fun things teachers could do with these poems to promote fluency.

One question you would ask before a read aloud: What is a neighborhood? What is your neighborhood like?
Reading strategies connection: These poems lend themselves very well to a Grand Conversations (Tompkins 43). Any of the poems would work well for a grand conversation on their own (“The House with the Wooden Windows” could be especially provocative) or you could compile three or four poems from the book and talk about community and neighborhoods in general. After reading the poem(s), students would do a quick write or sketch to organize their response to the text. If there is time the students would then form small groups to discuss the poems and finally the class would meet as a whole and carry on a grand conversation. During the conversation students initiate the questions/topics for discussion and other respond. As conversation begins to wane the teacher steps in and asks more pointed questions to highlight big ideas that have not been addressed. Finally, students return to their reading logs and reflect in writing on the conversation.