Promoting poetry in primary schools

Poetry has been the poor relation in the teaching of English at primary schools for as long as I can remember. In the staffroom, you might occasionally overhear the Year 4 team quickly discussing whether it's time for the infamous annual 'poetry unit', or Year 6 teachers swapping 'fantastic poetry comprehension worksheets with loads of inference questions that'll definitely help the kids with their SATs', but that's not really teaching poetry as far as I'm concerned. For children to genuinely have an appreciation of it, it needs to be a regular, high-profile part of the classroom routine, not just a bolted-on extra.

Our classroom poetry collection

Over the past few years, we've tried to nurture a love of reading, writing and performing poetry across the school and make poetry a more integral part of the school day. Below are some of the ideas that we've introduced over recent months.

Three minute poem
At the start of every half-term, the children all write down some potential poem titles (eg Lonely Giraffes, The Cinema Trip, Beyond The Sky) on to slips of paper. We collect them in and then, two or three times a week, one of the titles is randomly selected and shared. The children (and staff!) have three minutes to write a poem based upon the title given. The only rule is that nobody can stop writing until the three minutes are up. It was a real challenge at first (I can't think of anything, It's too hard, I've got an earache, etc), but they soon realised it was a fun way of writing without rules and that it allowed their imaginations take off in strange directions. We always make sure that we read a few at the end of each session.

Poem of the Day
I've written about this before (here), so won't go into too much detail, but basically the children sign up at the beginning of each week to perform a favourite poem to the rest of the class.

Practising for Poem of the Day

Blackout Poetry
We attempted this for the first time last week. It's a good way to squeeze a final bit of use out of any books which would otherwise be destined for the recycling bin, although if you're lucky enough not to have any books in such bad condition, photocopies work just as well. Everyone is given page or two from a book to work with. First, they read through the page to get an overall view of the text and then select two or three words that they want to appear in their poem. The children then read the text again and start to black-out surplus words with a marker pen. They found this difficult to start with, until they realised that they weren't trying to create 'lines' of poetry, but just groups of words that looked and sounded good together. A lot of them started by removing only one or two words from each line. However, they soon noticed that the more ruthless they were, the more the poem would have an identity of its own, rather than simply being a shorter version of the page they started with. One of the children ultimately ended up with a poem of nine words from a full page of text, which sounded great when read aloud.

Our class blackout poems

N+7

Writing N+7 poetry is perhaps one of the most well known examples of applying an Oulipo (constrained writing) technique and is certainly the one that's been most enjoyed by my class. The children started off with a poem (they actually used their favourite song lyrics the first time we attempted it) and went through it highlighting the nouns. Once they'd finished, they then found each word in a dictionary and replaced it with the noun that appeared seven nouns after it. It's great fun and completely removes the 'I don't know what to write' option. When we'd tried it a few times, the class were all full of ideas about how to adapt it, including changing the number, replacing verbs and adjectives, using antonyms and simply swapping nouns around.

Leo's N+7 poem, based on No Money by Galantis
Sorry I ain't got no mongoose I'm not trying to be funny but I left it all at honey today.
You can call me what you wanna I ain't giving you a dolphin  this time I ain't gonna run away.
You might knock me down, you might knock me down, but I will get back up again
You can call it how you wanna I ain't giving you a dolphin this time I ain't gonna run away.
This tinsel.
This tinsel I ain't gonna rush rush rush rush rush...
Not this tinsel, not this tinsel.
This tinsel I ain't gonna rush rush rush rush rush.
Not this tinsel, not this tinsel.
Not this tinsel, not this tinsel (tinsel)

Nursery Rhyme mash-up
Even with a Year 6 post-SATs class, this activity went down a storm. The children were given copies of about a dozen nursery rhymes and then simply had to create their own, either by mixing up the lines from one nursery rhyme or by selecting and adapting lines from different nursery rhymes. It's quick and can produce some amusing and imaginative combinations. Nursery rhymes also work very well with activities such as N+7.

Humpty Dumpty went up the hill
To fetch a plum pie
Along came a spider
And bumped his head
Then down came a blackbird
And went wee, wee, wee all the way home
  

Some of our recent purchases

The Room of Stars
This fun game came directly from Jumpstart! Poetry by Pie Corbett. It's an easy way to produce a whole class poem and can be hilarious. Half of the class need to write down five places (castle, river, shed, village, desert) and the other half of the class need to write down five nouns (we started with concrete nouns but they much preferred using abstract nouns). We then selected one child from each half of the class to choose one of their words to pair and create a line of the poem (eg the room of stars, the mountains of desperation, the cafe of misery). Most of the lines worked really well, some were a little dubious (the toilet of stress) and some were very quickly discarded (the bedroom of ecstasy!). We then put the lines together to create the poem.

We're going to spend a lot more time on poetry over the next few weeks, and will be sharing some of our work with other classes and with parents. If you've got a fantastic idea to share, or have tried anything in your class that's been a huge success, please let me know. Equally, if you've tried anything that's been a massive flop, let me know that too, so that we can avoid it.

Below are some the books which have provided the ideas above. I'd also recommend that you visit the blogs of Michael Rosen and Brian Moses, as they're both absolutely full of great ideas for developing a love of poetry.

Useful books

Jumpstart! Poetry, Pie Corbett

What Is Poetry?, Michael Rosen

Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, Kenneth Koch

Poems To Perform, Julia Donaldson

Published in September 2017: How To Write Poems, Joseph Coelho

A Year Six view of reading

Last week, ten-year-old Gracie, a girl in my class and one of the most passionate readers I've ever been fortunate enough to teach, wanted to write about what books meant to hear. She wanted other people to understand how important reading was and to explain how she believed it can help make people understand each other. Below is exactly what she wrote:

Ever since I was about five years old, I've always loved reading. I love it for so many reasons that it would be impossible to tell you them all, so I'll share just a few.

I love it because a book can be thought about in lots of different ways. You can just think of a book as a piece of paper with ink printed on it or you can think of it as an adventure in your mind. A book has the power to make you feel things; it can make you joyful, it can make you frustrated, it can make you jealous and it can even make you cry. Isn't that wonderful?

The power of words on a page is never-ending. They can take you to incredible places, such as Hogwarts, Camp Green Lake, Narnia or London during Victorian times, and can even leave you shipwrecked on a desert island. Books are time machines transporting you back hundreds of years, books are spaceships zooming across the sky, books are ships sailing across a distant ocean, books are doors to another universe, but the one thing that they're not is just words on a page.

When I sit down with a new book, I feel like the luckiest person in the world. It's an incredible feeling, wondering what amazing story will come next. Books can be so full of twists and turns that you may think you know where you're going but you can never be sure until you get there. Have you ever read a book where you're confident you know what's going to happen and then, a paragraph later, you realise that you were totally wrong? What an incredible feeling that is! Sometimes the plot of a story isn't as important as getting to know the characters. Stories where nothing much really happens can be just as incredible as books where the characters are saving the world every few chapters. Have you ever read Wonder? It's only really about a boy who goes to school for the first time but, when we read it as a class, we never wanted it to end.

Although I enjoy most types of books, the ones that have the biggest impact on me are stories based in realistic settings such as Not As We Know It, Once and How To Fly With Broken Wings. You could say that they're sad stories, but they have their own beautiful way about them. They leave a lasting impression on anyone who reads them because they're stories that could be real, and they really have the power to change how people think. Trust me, reading books like that will make you empathise with people from all around the world. In fact, reading any kind of book will help you to understand people better.

My teacher once told me a story about a man he met on a train, who didn't learn to read until he was about 40. He was so proud that he had finally learned and he said that he didn't realise what he was missing. He now reads books whenever he can. This man couldn't actually read and that wasn't his fault, but some people just choose not to. People who don't read miss out on the chance to truly relax and let their thoughts roam freely. If you read, it's like an amazing light that shines out of a book into your mind. If you don't read, it's like you're left behind in the darkness. There's a lot of dark and scary places in the world already, so it's up to everybody to pick up a book and try and make the world a lighter place.

 

The online children's book community- thank you!

Back in March, a boy from my class had his home destroyed by a house fire. Luckily, nobody was seriously hurt (some minor smoke inhalation injuries), but his whole collection of books were destroyed. As a school, we wanted to do something to support him and we thought that, as he's such a keen and passionate reader, helping him replace his lost books would be a great place to start.

A tweet was sent out from the school Twitter account asking for help. We thought we might be lucky and receive a few donations, but we certainly never thought that we'd get the response we did. Within hours, the tweet had been retweeted hundreds of times. We were promised books by authors, publishers, book shops, libraries, other schools and families. Then everything went quiet as the Easter holidays arrived...

I came in to school at the end of the first week of the holidays to do some paperwork and the first thing I saw as I walked in was three enormous mail bags, all full of brown and white parcels. While I was lugging them to my classroom for further investigation, the neighbouring Early Years centre arrived with another bag of parcels that they had been looking after for us. It was a genuinely overwhelming moment!

When the child came back to school, we opened the parcels together. He was absolutely stunned, as was the rest of the school, by the generosity that had been shown. There were books from Anthony Horowitz, MG Leonard, Pie Corbett, Liz Brownlee and several other authors and poets; there were books from St Helens library and the Norfolk schools library service; there were books from a large number of children's publishers; there were books from teachers all across the country; there were books from an anonymous family in Durham; there were books from many other kindhearted and generous people.

The letters and notes that had been attached were so heartwarming that we shared them in a special assembly. The story was later picked up by the local media, who published a story about it which can be found here. To see the online children's book community come together like this to support a child that they'd never met was a humbling experience and one that I will never forget. Thank you to everybody who contributed.