Teach Primary 18.8

Writing poetry is a fantastic way of getting your students to play with language. Once they’ve learnt the basic structures of a poem, such as lines and verses, they can write freely and in a way that other writing, with its grammatical and punctuation rules, doesn’t always allow for. In class, I normally focus on either a narrative poem – a poem with a story – or I free my writers up to play with words, syntax, figurative language and imagery. Think of poetry more as the freeform jazz of writing than structured storytelling. 1 | NARRATIVE STRUCTURE Encourage pupils to think about where their shadow might go, what it might see, and how it might interact with other shadows. Use an existing poem to show how poems are split into verses. Explain that in a narrative poem, we still use verses, but these verses can tell a story. Model how the poem’s verses moving down the page can be transposed onto a story timeline. Where does the shadow start? Where does it go next? Aim for a minimum of four verses and a maximum of six. Gather ideas from the class and plot them onto a timeline (see Fig1.): Remind children that each box in your timeline of the shadow’s story will become a verse in the poem. Collect ideas from the class on where the shadow might go and write them onto the timeline. For example: 1) Leaves the bedroom of a sleeping man. 2) Flies over the city. 3) Moves over the sea. 4) Returns home. START HERE MAIN LESSON WHAT THEY’LL LEARN l Develop a narrative structure for a poem l Play with words to build imagery l Explore sensory language l Use figurative language English As a class, watch our video featuring poets posing different intriguing questions ( tinyurl.com/ poetry-prompts ). For this lesson, I will use poet Kate Wakeling’s prompt, but you can easily adapt these ideas to suit other prompts. Kate’s prompt is this: What would happen if your shadow unhooked itself from you and went off and spent a whole day alone? What would happen if the whole world’s shadows were unhooked from the objects they link to? Ask children to close their eyes and think about what would happen if their shadow could unhook itself and explore the world. Where would it go? What would it see? Share initial thoughts. Imagine if your shadow ran away... Use a prompt from a CLiPPA prize winning poet to spark inspiration, says Chris Youles KS2 LESSON PLAN @chrisyoules chrisyoulesblog.wordpress.com Fig 1. 92 | www.teachwire.net