Discovered Claire A. Nivola at the Carle Museum. Read Emma's Poem to second- and third-graders at my school library, played an audio recording of part of the poem ("The New Colossus") set to music, and asked them to write their own welcome messages to new arrivals. Good for Jewish American Heritage month (May). ( )

Summary: The book starts out as Emma as a child and how she was always rich and only knew rich people growing up. It then tells how Emma went to New York Harbor and saw many very poor people. It tells how the people were Jews like Emma but were treated very badly in Europe and that Emma hurt to see them. Emma felt she had to help so she visited them often and helped them learn English and get jobs. In that time people kept quiet about immigrants but Emma did not. She wrote in papers and poems about how they needed help. Emma heard about a statue that was being built to show the friendship for the United States but money was needed for the base of the statue to be built. Many writers were asked to write something that could be sold to raise money. Emmas was the only one read at the celebration. Three years later the money was raised and the statue was built. Thirty years later Emma's poem was printed in school text books.

Personal Reaction: I enjoyed reading this book. I actually did not know these specific facts about the Statue of Liberty and so it was very interesting to me. I think that this book would definitely keep the attention of a young reader.

Classroom Extensions: One thing you could do for an extension would be to print off and teach the students Emma's actual Poem now that they know the story behind it they would be more interested in learning it. Another extension you could do would be to offer the students extra credit or longer recess if they used the next week to memorize the poem and recite it to the class the following week. ( )

This is the story of Emma Lazarus and how she came to be the voice of the Statue of Liberty. It tells the tale of her privileged background, her interest in writing and poetry and her active philanthropic work with refugees in the city of New York.

Summary:
A story of a girl who grew up with everything and later became an woman with everything. She then met some poor immigrant people on a boat to New York harbor. That was the first time she met them and ended up helping those people read, write, and even helped with what she could. She started writing to help make people realize that these poor people were people as well. It helped some but not a lot. Until the Statue of Liberty was to be built and she wrote a poem about what the lady of the Statue of Liberty would be thinking and saying to the people she saw passing by.

Personal Reaction:
I really loved Emma's Poem. Its so great how the poem from this lady really impacted a lot of people and how they think and react to people. Its a great message and I would definitely love reading this story to children.

Classroom Extension:
1) History day where everyone will learn about the Statue of Liberty and make their own hats
2) Have students write a poem of what they think they would say if they were the Statue of Liberty. :)

This lovely picture-book biography of the nineteenth-century Jewish American poet Emma Lazarus, and her best-remembered work, The New Colossus, whose final lines - "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" - are indelibly connected to the Statue of Liberty, and to the idea (well, one of them, anyway) of the immigrant in American culture, moved me to tears this morning, as I read it on my morning commute.

Opening with Lazarus' comfortable childhood and youth, as the daughter of prosperous New Yorkers, and then moving through her gradual awakening to the realities of poverty and suffering, particularly amongst immigrants (many of them Jewish, like herself), her growing involvement as an educator in the immigrant community, and as an advocate for the less fortunate in the press of the day, the book concludes with her penning of her famous sonnet, as part of an effort to raise money for a base for the Statue of Liberty, and the great fame the poem has won, even down to the present day.

Linda Glaser's deceptively calm narrative has an emotional depth to it that will immediately draw the reader into her story - into Emma Lazarus' story. The accompanying watercolor and gouache artwork by Claire A. Nivola is incredibly beautiful, with a somewhat stylized feeling that never detracts from its emotional impact. I'm struggling to express just why it is that this title so moved me... perhaps because, through Lazarus' awakening to the world around her, and her incredible commitment to doing something about the injustices of that world, the reader too feels awakened? In any case, Emma's Poem is just a lovely, lovely book, one I recommend to anyone (teacher, parent, librarian) putting together a lesson on immigration or the Statue of Liberty, and to young readers interested in those topics, or in Emma Lazarus. ( )