I have rashly volunteered to help at the local Primary School. I met with a P4 teacher today who would like me to help her pupils enter poems in a local competition where the theme is 'Identity'.

I think that this is a fairly difficult concept for youngsters to catch on to.

I planned to start off by sparking them with ideas about identity

Superhero aspect - Batman, Spiderman etc
Masks - a masked ball, uniforms
Things that tell others who you are - passports, driving licences, birth certificates....moving into areas such as football strips, gangs etc

Once they have loads of ideas, I thought about asking them to select one idea that appeals to them a and have them write a story about it. The story could then be developed into a poem.

All this is well and good - but I have not the slightest idea how to move from this to poetry. What sort of poetry should P4's be writing? Assistance gratefully received - by Wednesday :-o

Alison Cross

Hi Ali

What about the good old Poetry Corner - a corner of the room filled with poetry books and poems stuck on the wall. And read them and have them read lots of poetry - kids learn by mimicry don't they, so once they get the hang of rhythm you should find that, given the other stuff you're doing to get them started, they will start putting stuff together for themselves.

Then, if you look at some of the exercises I sent you off line, you could try stuff like List Poems, ABC Poems etc.

Hope that helps
di

Alix, WWer Nik Perring does a lot of kids writing workshops - he would have good advice, I'm sure. Very good luck with it.

One other thought about identity - how about some variation on, 'if you were a boat/tree/book/animal/noise, what would you be?' and then get them to explore those as an aspect of themselves.

Emma

Di - thanks for that. A poetry corner will be a great addition to the classroom! The only snag is that that I've only got 3 weeks (in other words 3 hours) to get the poems written.

But if I'm invited back to help with the kids on a more general creative writing basis, I will certainly ask the teacher if this is feasible.

Emma - this is a great idea! I've just spent the past 10 minutes writing down 30 things on bits of paper so that each child can pull a topic to explore in this way.

Thank you both :-)

Anyone with any other suggestions as to how I can suddenly turn some 8 year-olds into poets?!

There is a truly, truly great book about teaching children to write poetry called, I think, 'It doesn't have to rhyme'. You might want to think of ways to discuss how poetry doesn't have to rhyme in the conventional sense as half of them will think, nor is it a sentence chopped up into bits as the other half will, but that sounds and rhythm to have a lot to do with it all. Alliteration's always a good place to start with sounds, and internal rhymes, skipping and clapping rhymes or sea-shanties or rap for rhythm. (Actually rap's good for rhyme too, of course)

Emma

re Rap - I'm a Glaswegian, not exactly noted for their rapping.

Mind you, have you heard Robbie Williams' efforts recently. SToke doesn't produce good rappers either LOL!

Thanks for the heads up on the book - I'll see if I can find it.

AX

From the dim recesses of my brain come the idea that the author's name is Brown, but I wouldn't promise.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean about Stoke rapping.

Emma

Bloomin' hell - it's £50 on Amazon!!!


<Added>

- gone to Abebooks where it appears to be available for about £8 :-)

Yikes! It used to be a not-very-expensive paperback. I wonder if it's now only available from some textbook publisher for that kind of price. Thank god for Abebooks. It might well be in a library, too - at least one that has has any trainee-teachers in its orbit.

Emma

Have you thought about going on the Poetry Archive website http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home
There is a teacher's page with good ideas. Also BBC education page or Bitesize I think it's called will help you with all the key stages - what the should be doing when.

managed to procure it from the US for 81p! Can't say fairer than that really. Postage about a fiver. Bargain :-)

Found a good site called PoetryTeachers.com which is American, but has good excercises that seem like fun.

Ran some off and went to school today, quaking in my Kickers. They were only about 7 years old, but there were 32 of them!

They were a bit bored to begin with, but once we started asking for words that rhymed with red, pink etc we were off and running. We missed off rhymes for white, for obvious reasons :-)

Going back next week for some more!

S'funny, I didn't receive notification of the last couple of replies to this thread. Wonder if my e-mail is acting up again? Hmmm if there is one thing worse than having no access to e-mail it's having unreliable access to e-mail.

AX