Teach Reading and Writing Issue 19

www.teachwire.net | 19 Matt Goodfellow is a poet and former primary teacher. His first middle-grade verse novel, The Final Year , is out now. an important discussion in the classroom about cultural heritage and identity. Encourage discussion around how poets can reject the notion that we should all be forced to speak in a way that was agreed upon by a small group of rich, powerful people a few hundred years ago. Very quickly, a class (and possibly a teacher) who might begin the book feeling nervous about poetry, can begin to understand the endless possibilities that poetry offers. Building your verse library I would always recommend teachers have a range of poetry to hand, from single-voice collections to anthologies containing lots of different voices. Children will gain most from this variety of material if they hear poetry daily, as they will then be constantly learning how different poets do different things – all of it poetry. There are a huge number of free poetry resources available online that can beam poets into classrooms for free. The Children’s Poetry Archive ( childrens. poetryarchive.org ) is a fantastic resource, which has gathered audio recordings of some of the best children’s poets and then stored them online for free. The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) website also has an awesome array of resources ( clpe.org . uk/poetry ). It includes over 500 videos of poets reading their work and talking about why poetry matters to them – giving hints and tips to young writers who want to begin their own writing. Award-winners As well as this, the CLPE runs its yearly poetry award (the CLiPPA), which creates a shortlist of what it considers to be the best books of poetry for young people published each year. Amongst the poetry collections, there are often verse novels. The CLiPPA is the only award solely presented for published children’s poetry in the UK, and I’m proud that my books Caterpillar Cake , Bright Bursts of Colour and Let’s Chase Stars Together have all been shortlisted for it. CLPE produces lesson plans and video resources for each book on the shortlist, which are free for any school to download on their website ( tinyurl.com/ tp-ClippaSequence ). The CLPE also runs a shadowing scheme, where schools send in videos of children performing a poem from one of the shortlisted titles. These are judged and the winners get to perform on stage at the award show, at the National Theatre in London, alongside the poets. Being shortlisted for the CLiPPA and involved in all the activity around the award has provided me with a much larger platform and audience for my work than I’d normally have had, as well as an invaluable opportunity to work alongside other poets and writers. It’s great to have the videos and resources from CLPE to recommend to schools, and it’s always fantastic to see the impact of the shadowing scheme and to meet the winning schools. Getting all kinds of poetry into the classroom is such a powerful and important thing to do – and verse novels are a perfect way to begin the process. Read them for pleasure in the classroom and discuss how they make the pupils feel. Let poets’ voices be heard, in order to unlock the authentic voices of the young people you teach. C L AS SROOM AC T I V I T I E S HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF VERSE Try to expose pupils to poems every day. As well becoming more comfortable with poetry as a genre, they will begin to identify and appreciate the variety of ways poets write. Read verse novels as a class and for pleasure. Modelling the text for the children is invaluable in helping them understand how the poet intended their writing to be interpreted by the reader. Make sure children can see how poetry looks on the page as it is read aloud. If you don’t have budget for a full class set of a book, use a screen to share it instead. Open class discussions about how poetry is like mercury, flowing whichever way it wants into any shape and space. Use as many available resources as you can to get a good range of contemporary voices into the classroom. Let the children see that poetry is for everyone. When teaching a new verse novel, make sure you read it before the children do. Verse novels often have powerful and difficult themes that you may need to discuss and think about as a class. “Verse novels are succinct, to the point and pared down”