Teach Primary Issue 19.5

T E ACH RE AD I NG AND WR I T I NG www.teachwire.net | 65 lets you know you’ve got X-infested Y? ” These three questions, that are very simple to answer, give us a starting point. Maybe it’s slugs in your pancakes (you spot them by the oozing), or it’s a hippo in your shredded wheat (maybe you see a smooth, grey thing bobbing in your milk), or it’s a wolf under your toast (watch out for the fluffy tail poking out the side). Then the fourth question is, “ What do you do then? ’ By which I mean, “ How do you make the situation safe, not just for yourself, but for everyone else? ” (That last bit is important, because ‘Walk away and have something else,’ is correct, but not very interesting!) A good tip here is to point out any problems with the pupil’s idea. Not in a harping, “ Oh, that’s so silly ” way, of course, but in a supportive, encouraging, expansive way. For example, if they’ve written about a piranha in the orange juice, and their solution is “ Chuck it out the window, ” you can question what would happen if, say, the postie came up the path at that exact point and got a hungry, angry piranha in the face! What might they do instead? Ideas, ideas, ideas I like the idea of getting a plan for dealing with the problem, and then letting it not work, so that you need to come up with a second scheme, or a third scheme – put some roadblocks in the way, and now you’ve got a story. Alternatively, if you don’t want to write a whole narrative, you could just take the first two questions and write a list poem of animals in hiding places, maybe repeating them and adding more description, so ‘Gorillas in the bran flakes,’ becomes, ‘Gorillas wiggling in the bran flakes,’ becomes, ‘Grumpy gorillas wiggling in the bran flakes,’ becomes, ‘Grumpy gorillas wiggling in the crunchy bran flakes,’ becomes, ‘Grumpy gorillas wildly wiggling in the crunchy bran flakes’. So, you see, the right prompts can give you the ingredients for whatever you want to make. A poem, a story, a health and safety warning poster, a little play, all and any of which should be funny in one way or another because of the unexpected juxtapositions. (I sometimes meet a quite literal-minded kid who takes me to task because bears are actually so much bigger than cornflakes that my poem doesn’t make sense , but even they can hide a deadly spider in some cereal!) Three or four simple questions can open the door to endless silly stories and imagination – you just need to be willing to step through. TP It’s kind of a FUNNY STORY... AF Harrold’s Pocket Book of Pocket Poems , illustrated by Jack Viant (£7.99, Bloomsbury Education), is out now. afharroldkids.com/poetry-videos “Three or four simple questions can lead to endless silly stories” Use four simple questions to inject humour into original writing, says AF Harrold A s a poet who visits a lot of schools, I’m often asked, “ Where do you get your ideas? ”. A girl asked this even more bluntly just the other day, in a young writers’ group I was visiting in a local library, as she questioned how I cope with writer’s block. Well, here’s a quick exercise, based on a poem of mine called ‘The Perils of Breakfast’, that I usually use as an icebreaker on school visits. This activity solves that ‘blank page’ problem, and can lead easily to some funny places. The poem is about a bear hiding in your cornflakes and how dangerous this can be. After performing the poem, I ask four questions. Break it down First, “ Can you think of another dangerous animal? ” A nice easy starting point. The trick here is to ask pupils to make it specific. A black widow spider is different from a tarantula. A boa constrictor is different from a cobra. A sausage dog is different from a wolf. Second, ask “ Where might that animal be hiding? ”. I’m usually still thinking about the breakfast table/kitchen, but I’m always happy if kids want to hide animals around the school, in the house, at the supermarket… already we’re growing beyond the original poem. Third, get the children to think about the question “ What might be the telltale sign that