Teach Primary 18.8

• How does imagining your shadow’s journey change the way you think about shadows? • How do you want your reader to feel when reading your poem? • Can you work with a partner to change your word choices? For example, swap two words for one (such as ‘big building’ for ‘skyscraper’) or add an adjective (‘towering skyscrapers’). 2 | BUILDING IMAGERY Put one of the shadow’s journey ideas at the centre of a piece of flipchart paper or on your whiteboard. You’ll add more to this idea by creating a mind map around it. To do this, gather ideas of what might be seen by the shadow (nouns) and then try and build up some powerful imagery around these ideas using the senses and figurative language. Model this using the second idea (the shadow flying over the city). Start by collecting as many ideas of sights as possible: cars, skyscrapers, buildings, people, parks, etc. Next, add in the other senses, such as sounds: cars honking, people in a stadium cheering, a construction site with diggers etc. You could also add smells, taste and touch • Create a shadow puppet theatre and perform shadow plays based on the poems. Could pupils turn their poem into a script for the performance? • Add an extra verse or write a story about a shadow meeting another shadow. Are they the only two shadows in the world? Have the whole world’s shadows become free? • Add a verse from the point of view of the person who has lost their shadow. What would it feel like to not have a shadow? What would they think about their shadow’s disappearance? Would they look for their shadow? Where would they look? • Link the poem to a science topic on light by exploring what causes shadows or tie it into an art lesson on how to draw realistic shadows. EXTENDING THE LESSON story paragraph. One way of combatting this is to give the class a writing framework for the first verse that has a limit on how many words they can use. If you don’t want to constrict them this way, carefully model turning some of the ideas into a verse. An easy way to keep the narrative flowing is to use the first line of each verse to describe the shadow moving, then use the other lines to build poetic imagery. The shadow, silent, flies above the bustling city. A river of cars winds through the streets. Towering skyscrapers pierce the sky. Sirens wail, car horns honk, the city’s heartbeat pulses through the air. Once you have modelled an example verse, students can use this process to write the rest of the poem independently. Chris Youles is an assistant head and author of the bestselling books Sentence Models for Creative Writing and Teaching Story Writing in Primary . He has been an English lead, writing moderator and a specialist leader in education. “Carefullymodel turning some of the ideas into a verse” USEFUL QUESTIONS here, leading to interesting discussions about what the shadow can and can’t experience. Put your class into groups and get them to add as many ideas as possible. If there is a specific element of figurative language you want to focus on such as similes, metaphors or personification, remind students how to build these in. Create a large collection of words and imagery (always go for a lot more than you end up using, as it helps build the idea of making writerly choices). 3 | VERSE WRITING Take the ideas you have created and explain to pupils that they will now turn them into a single verse. Students find this part the hardest, as many will accidentally write a www.teachwire.net | 93