How to Teach Poetry Writing: Workshops for Ages 8-13

Developing Creative Literacy

Michaela Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351595841
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This fully revised and extended third edition of How to Teach Poetry Writing: Workshops for Ages 8–13 is a practical and activity-based resource of writing workshops to help you teach poetry. Designed to build writing, reading, speaking and listening skills, this new edition contains a widened selection of workshops exemplifying a variety of poetry styles, both classic and contemporary.

Highlighting how the unique features of poetry can be used to teach literary skills, this book:

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• includes new workshops which introduce, or consolidate, spelling, punctuation and grammar skills;

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• encourages debate, discussion, performance and empathy;

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• offers a new focus on confidence building and creativity using performance, rhythm, rhyme and rap;

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• explores the use of poetry for vocabulary enhancement;

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• encourages reading for pleasure;

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• provides an A to Z guide to poetry and poetry terminology plus a very extensive bibliography enabling you to keep up to date with poetry and poetry resources;

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• represents diverse cultures;

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• highlights cross-curricular links.

Promoting creativity, achievement, mastery and enjoyment, How to Teach Poetry Writing: Workshops for Ages 8–13 provides teachers with a wealth of material and the inspiration to create a class of enthusiastic and skilled readers, writers, listeners and performers.

Workshop 1: Licensed to Thrill

Key concepts

Performing poetry

Speaking and listening

This workshop is a starting point for young poets. Listening to verse and speaking it aloud is a vital step to appreciating and writing poetry.

The aim of this workshop is to add extra energy and enjoyment to the poetry class and to boost confidence.

The advice on performing poetry is given in the form of a performance poem. Children can use this verse as a springboard to their own performances and to writing their own performance poem.

In a playful way, awareness of punctuation and line breaks is increased.

Read! Speak! Listen! Enjoy!

• Enlarge and display the poem so that the whole class can see it. If you use a Visualiser or an Interactive Whiteboard, keep a printed copy on display so that children can look at the poem repeatedly and in their own time.
• Show some poetry performance, using
  –www.poetryarchive.org
  –www.poetryarchive.org/childrensarchive/home.do
  –performapoem.lgfl.org.uk
  –www.clpe.org.uk/poetryline – you can watch and listen to many poets performing their work – including me.
• Enjoy performing the poem. Read the poem aloud several times. Encourage children to work in pairs or groups performing the poem.

Discuss

• Discuss the advice given on performing poetry. Is there more advice you could add?
• Look at punctuation. What hints does the punctuation give for performance? Demonstrate stopping for full stops, lingering (not too long) at a comma, pausing at ellipses … .
• Look at line-breaks. Many of the lines are short and snappy but some lines run together (e.g. ‘Hold your head high. Don’t stare at the ground’.) What effect should this have on the way the poem is read/performed?
• What other ‘how-to-perform’ clues can children find? Font? Boldness? Size? Choice of word?
• Are there any lines children particularly like? Why? Are there lines they would like to add or take away?

Write

Whole-class activity with teacher as scribe. Write a whole-class performance poem that gives instructions.

Some ideas to get started with are:

• What your mum/dad, friends/teacher says (do this/do that)
• How to score a goal (Head it! Kick it! Lob it high … )
• How to train a pet
• How to get an idea

Move on to small group, pair or independent work.

Hints for writing this performance poem:

• Note that instructions are usually short and snappy.
• They may be exclamations. Sit down! Stand up!
• Aim for economy of language.
• Don’t be afraid to repeat a word, a phrase or to have a refrain

(e.g. My mum says tidy up.

My mum says read that book.

My mum says I’ve lost my key.

My mum says I’ll kiss your knee.)

• Performance poems often rhyme – but they don’t have to.
• If you want to find extra rhymes, use a good rhyming dictionary.
• If you can’t find a rhyme you can re-order your line so that the last line rhymes more easily, you can leave it out, or you can change the word.
• At the revision stage, look at cutting lines out or rearranging them for better effect.
• Look at line breaks and punctuation. Will it give your readers a clue about how you want them to read the poem?

Perform! Enjoy Applaud!

Put on a performance for the class or school.

Performances can be recorded and uploaded to the Perform a Poem website. ¹

Some schools run very successful poetry performance competitions – sometimes linked to learning poetry by heart. This can add an extra poetry buzz to the school. Parents, other classes etc. can be invited to enjoy the performance.

Read on

Read other performance poems in a variety of styles and voices. Details of some collections of performance poems are given in the Bibliography on p. 105.

Follow up

Read a poem out to your class on a daily basis.

A poem can be very short – so you WILL have the time.

No discussion need be involved – just read it out and enjoy it.

Check out competitions, e.g. the BBC ran the ‘Off B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note from the Author: Third Edition
• Introduction: Writers’ Workshop
• Almost Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Poetry: A to Z
• Workshop 1: Licensed to Thrill – performing poetry
• Workshop 2: Monday’s Child – rhyming couplets, poems from different cultures and times, language changes over time, traditional and modern poetry, half-rhyme/near-rhyme, using an existing poem as a springboard to own creative work, poems that provoke discussion and deal with issues
• Workshop 3: The Day the Zoo Escaped – redrafting, encouraging use of powerful verbs and adverbs, revising, synonyms and antonyms
• Workshop 4: Every Word Counts – careful word choice, syllable counting, linebreaks, classic and modern poetry, producing polished poetry through revision, deletion, reorganisation
• Workshop 5: Fin Flapper – kennings, language choice and control, creating new words, alliteration, description
• Workshop 6: Waves – shape/concrete poetry, wordplay, calligrams, onomatopoeia
• Workshop 7: Further On – language awareness, idioms and wordplay, compound words, figurative language
• Workshop 8: Space Rap – performance poetry, maintaining rhythm, writing in rhyme, linking poetry to the rest of the curriculum
• Workshop 9: The Robin – rhyming or unrhyming poetry, the effect of layout, observation/senses, writing a poetic sentence
• Workshop 10: The Poem Hunt – the senses, descriptive language, drafting and editing, commas
• Workshop 11: I Am a Baggy T-Shirt – metaphor, figurative language
• Workshop 12: The Sound Collector – onomatopoeia, following a rhyme scheme, narrative poem, exploring the sense of hearing
• Workshop 13: Nocturnophobia – personification, free verse, similes, synonyms, invented language
• Workshop 14: Three – levels of meaning, redrafting, idioms and wordplay, figurative language, link with fable and myth, half-rhyme
• Workshop 15: December – poems reflecting different cultures and voices, internal rhyme, comparison of different treatment of classic and contemporary themes
• Workshop 16: Hubble Bubble – comparison of different treatment of classic and contemporary themes, using existing poems as a springboard to creativity, familiarity with classic authors, performance
• Workshop 17: The Charge of the Light Brigade – classic narrative poetry, poems dealing with historic events or true stories, effective use of strong rhyme, rhythm and repetition, writing a narrative poem, strong verbs
• Workshop 18: My First Day at School – contemporary narrative poetry, poems that raise issues and encourage debate and discussion, poems to encourage questioning and empathy, poems that clearly link to the rest of the curriculum
• Workshop 19: Spag Alert! – performance, punctuation, reading for pleasure, spelling
• Workshop 20: Spelling It Out! – suffixes, spelling, rhythm/rhyme/rap, performance
• Workshop 21: Hauntingly – adverbs/fronted adverbials, creating or capturing an atmosphere
• Workshop 22: Framed! – revision or introduction of names of parts of speech, vocabulary selection and enhancement leading to creative writing, revision and redrafting, opportunity to write a poem to fit in with any aspect of the curriculum
• Introduction to bibliography
• Some useful websites
• A to Z of Poets