Joyful Noise

The songs of nature are varied: whispering wind, bird calls, summer cicadas. We hear them, we learn in school that sounds are made by wings and vocal sacs and legs, and we steer through the seasons by them. But only a few people can duplicate the sounds. 

There's a book of poetry that I've enjoyed for a long time for the way it captures the feel of insect sounds, if not their literal noises. It's called Joyful Noise, a Newbery medal winner in 1989. Using parallel columns of text, the author, Paul Fleischman, introduces the reader to the whirling, buzzing, humming world of insect songs. Sometimes the readers read simultaneously and sometimes in alternating or overlapping lines.

I'd like to use this book (and an earlier volume on birds, I Am Phoenix) in a science curriculum, intertwining the worlds of scientific understanding and literature. True, Joyful Noise doesn't explain the difference between a grasshopper's thorax and abdominal spiracles, but it does give a child a floating, jumping sense of a grasshopper's life. 

There's the humorous account of a water strider who tries to teach another insect how to walk on water (OK, the surface tension of the water)...the poignant one-day life of the mayfly...the contrasting daily schedules of a queen and a worker bee...the mourning of the digger wasp...and a truly magical last page, taken from the diary of a caterpillar in its chrysalis. 

To read this book is to understand insects in the way most children do naturally: through observation and the way they make us feel. I'd like my students to experience that in the classroom, as well as in their backyards. 

Pair up, have a read, and hear the joyful noise for yourself. 

                                                             cicadas

                                                             pulsing

pulsing

chanting from the treetops             chanting from the treetops

sending

forth their                                           sending

booming                                            forth their

boisterous                                        booming

joyful noise!                                     joyful noise!