'Poetry Is'... Workshop Idea For KS2 & KS3 (and maybe KS1!)

You know a lesson plan is fairly successful when almost every member of a badly behaved and disengaged Year 8 class comes up with a genuinely interesting poem. This happened to me yesterday, complete with soul-destroying groan when I informed them that they would not be having the end-of-term video session they had been expecting, but would be writing poems instead. I'd like to share the lesson plan that I used. I think it can be adapted, if not simply replicated, for KS2 classes (and potentially KS1, as will be explored at the end of this post).

Warm Up Exercise

Pupils write as many examples as they can think of in each of the following categories:

• Something funny
• Something beautiful
• Something important (to them)
• Something interesting
• Something weird

It is crucial to impress upon them that there are no right or wrong answers, and that anything they write down will not be judged, condemned or criticised. They don't know it yet, but the things they write at this stage will form the raw material for their poems!

Sharing and Discussing Poetry

Have a discussion about what poetry is. Can anything be a poem? Simon and Garfunkel wrote that the four letters on the underground wall constitute a poem. Were they correct?

Share my poem 'Redefine' with the class (it is posted at the very end of this article). Have a discussion about any lines the pupils find especially interesting, or do not understand (once again: no right or wrong answers!). Pupils can underline any parts they found interesting.

Writing The Poem!

Having done the warm up exercise, and shared my poem, this bit is really simple. The warm up exercise has provided the raw material for a poem on the theme of 'Poetry Is...'. Nobody can say "WAAH! I CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING" because they have already written down their ideas! It could be as simple as taking the things they wrote in the warm up and prefacing them with the phrase 'poetry is' - less confident pupils can do this if they wish. More confident pupils can elaborate and develop the ideas, infusing them with interesting vocabulary and embellishing them in the light of my poem. Remember to leave time for pupils to share their work. Here are some of the lines that were generated by Year 8 yesterday:

"Poetry is the way my baby brother laughs"

"Poetry flows unexpectedly like a waterfall"

Poetry is that warm cup of cocoa you get when it's winter"

Benefits Of This Workshop

• This workshop marries the conceptual with the concrete in a way that is easy for pupils to engage with. 
• Differentiation is built into it - the warm up exercise has provided the raw material for everyone to work with in whichever ways they choose.
• Pupils are able to go as deep as they like. The ideas can be humorous and silly, deep and meaningful, or both. Pupils are given the space to explore meaningful, personal issues but are not forced to do so.
• I reckon this workshop could even work with KS1 pupils. For KS1 perhaps given each table the task of coming up with an example in each of the categories mentioned above in the 'Warm Up' section. Then stick 'poetry is' at the beginning of each of them, and join them up to make a group poem! I'd bet that this will be an impressive piece of work from such young pupils!

Redefine By Joshua Seigal

Poetry is a one-eyed dog howling ceaselessly

at a moon of cats, and a turtle sleeping softly

in the silence of her shell.

Poetry is the dance of a twisting flame, flirting

with the match; it’s the four letters on the inside wall

of the train station cubicle.

Poetry lies in the frantic laugh of the playground

and in the throat of your nine-year-old cousin

finally able to talk.

Poetry is the picture on the back of the cornflakes box

after a long, hungry night; it’s your name in lights

on your school football shirt.

Poetry is standing on a street corner, spitting

your voice at the wind. Poetry lives unheard

in the pores of your skin.

Please, Sir, Can I Make Things Up?

Since September I have been training to be a Spoken Word Educator at Goldsmiths College. The training involves running poetry workshops with secondary school pupils, a demographic with whom I have not previously done much work at all. I am finding it challenging; not unrewarding but sometimes lacking the spark of what I like to think of as mildly eccentric spontaneity that I bring to the primary school classroom. This is a corollary both of the age group with whom I am working - elephant impressions, audience participation, the shouting of nonsense words and other such elements of my work as a children's entertainer just will not fly - but also of the fact that I am a member of staff rather than merely a fun visiting poet. The students are expected to call me 'Sir' and 'Mr Seigal', and, I, for my part, am expected to wear a shirt.

The ethos of the Spoken Word Educator programme is providing students with a space, and helping them find a voice, to express issues and ideas that are important to them. It seems to be expected that students will write about their own lives, views and experiences, and they are encouraged to be as open as they feel able to be. What seems less expected is that some pupils would rather 'make stuff up'. And as keen as I am on finding out about the lives and concerns of my pupils, it is a key tenet of my ideology, my 'poetics', that poetry can be made up: during school assemblies I usually stress that one of the great things about poems and stories  is that they are in fact the only times in our whole lives when we are allowed to do so. I have often found that simply making this point is the catalyst for some wonderfully imaginative writing. Admittedly, however, all this applies to my primary school work, which reveals, I think, an important difference between the mentality of younger and older pupils: younger pupils are more keen on making things up.

I have replicated some of the work I have been doing as a Spoken Word Educator in the primary classroom, and it has mostly gone very well. For example, a prompt I have been working with is 'Welcome To My Family' - I wrote a poem with this title (which is too long, and not yet good enough, to post on this blog!) which is used as a springboard to spark ideas in the students. Older pupils seem to take it for granted that they are expected to be as 'truthful' as possible, and as such to talk about the reality of their family lives, but younger pupils seem keener to indulge in wild flights of fancy: making up family members, pretending they live among a family of wolves, pretending they have a two-headed sister, etc.

I have been impressed with such dexterity in imagination, but it has made me think hard about the purpose of the writing exercise: what is it exactly that I want the students to do? I want them to feel that they can express important issues that might otherwise lack an outlet, but I also want them to have fun and and indulge their creativity. At the same time, I don't want the former to intrude upon the latter, or the latter upon the former. It might be as simple as encouraging 'making stuff up' with primary school kids but discouraging it with secondary school kids, but why should this be the case? If older pupils want to write fun, silly poems about having an alien for a dad, if they want to express themselves in that way (as they very occasionally do), and if younger pupils want to tell us what life is really like in their family (as they often do) then why shouldn't they? I think a better solution would be to provide both age groups with a range of models, and inform the students that either of two valuable opportunities is available to them - telling us about their lives and indulging in make-believe. Both, I think, are valuable and neither are opportunities which are readily available outside of this context.

Some very important issues are under the surface here, and I think the immediacy and intimacy of the Spoken Word artform renders the issues of 'truth' and 'honesty' more pertinent than they might be in poetry generally. But I do not think the fact that a poem is being spoken precludes its being silly, fun, whimsical and fictional, and quite frankly a lot of the Spoken Word I have been encountering - by the professionals, not by the students, I should add - I find rather po-faced and overly earnest. This of course has a place, and some issues demand this kind of treatment, but I would hate students to go away thinking this constitutes the entirety of Spoken Word. Or maybe it does, and what I've been doing all along is 'Performance Poetry' rather than 'Spoken Word'. I just don't know, but I value the opportunity to explore the issues.

Bespoke Poems For Year 2 At St Antony's, Newham

Over the past few months I have been doing a fair amount of 'writing to order': I have been working on specific projects with a variety of groups and ages, from very little children to young adults, and have been churning out poetry to suit their workshop needs. I say 'churning out', which has fairly unpleasant, mechanical connotations, but in reality it has been a pleasure (and a challenge).

One of the groups with whom I have been doing an extended project is Year 2 at St Antony's School in Newham, East London. I have been working on the Catching Words project with them, which involves running poetry-based workshops every Friday morning this term. Each workshop focuses on a different aspect of poetry, and I have been writing some poems for the class to model the ideas. I'd like to share two of them now.

MORERAPS

One of the sessions took the form of a competition. Several, often fairly complicated, literary techniques were discussed with the class, and then they had to get into small groups and compete to see how many sentences they could write utilising each of these techniques. A handy acronym has been devised by poet Joe Coelho to help children remember them: MORERAPS. This stands for Metaphor, Onomatopeia, Rhyme, Emotion, Repetition, Alliteration, Personification and Simile - heady stuff for Year 2 kids! In order to model these notions in a simple and fun way, I wrote the class a special poem.

However, before I share the poem a bit of background is in order. St Antony's is a wonderfully creative school which goes to great lengths to inspire and enthuse its pupils. Thus, on the day when I ran the MORERAPS session, they had a writing day involving the whole school. In order to kick the day off, there was a full school assembly in which an actor, in the guise of a local historian, told the children that a weird, secret tunnel had been discovered running under the school. The teachers were in on the act too! For the rest of that day, the children had to complete writing activities based on this tunnel: what did it contain? How did it get there? Who is living in it? And so on.

Given all this, I thought it would be nice for my MORERAPS poem to follow the tunnel theme. So here it is:

TUNNEL POEM

I’m the terrible tunnel

I’m deep, damp and dark,

I stretch all the way

From the school to the park.

I’m the terrible tunnel

Coiled up like a snake,

I’ll fill you with terror

And make your boots quake.

I’ll make you scream AAAH!

I’ll make your bones judder,

For I am a demon

And I’ll make you shudder.

I’m the terrible tunnel

I’m deep, dark and damp,

Come and explore me,

Bring your best lamp.

I may be quite scary

And make your head spin,

But I hide some secrets –

So come on in!

.........................................................................................................

JOURNEY POEMS

Another workshop involved thinking about journeys, and in particular specific verbs children could use in describing their journeys. They were taken to the hall, where all the apparatus had been set up. Next to each piece of apparatus was a verb sheet, i.e. 'tiptoeing past the...', 'hopping over the...'. It was up to the children to complete the sentences in as weird and wonderful a way as their imaginations could muster.

Having come into the classroom from the hall, the children then wrote a poem describing what happened on their journeys. I modelled the following poem, to help spark their imaginations:

Escaping From School

I sneaked through classrooms

As dark as an ogre’s cave.

I hopped over a sticky, slimy swamp

Made out of mouldy school dinners.

I got lost among letters

In a jungle of words.

I balanced on a tightrope

Made out of pens and pencils.

I tiptoed past the dragon

Who lives in the headmistress’s room.

I jumped onto a raft

Made out of torn-up maths books

I ran down cavernous corridors

And crept towards sweet freedom...

... but the Receptionist said

“Sorry, you can’t get out that way.”

Admittedly the understated irony of that last stanza was lost on some of the Year 2 children, but I had fun writing it, and the children certainly came up with some wonderful poetry of their own, my favourite line being 'I sneaked past the demon dinner lady'. An idea for a poem, methinks!

Halloween-Based Workshop Idea

I have been busy over the last week, visiting primary schools in Camden, Bracknell, Hackney and Newham. As it is approaching Halloween, and as I have a thing about monsters anyway, I have been running some Halloween-based poetry workshops. I have refined it over the course of my schools visits, and I'd like to share it now. The thing I like about it is that it enables a lot to get done in a relatively short space of time, whilst still remaining fun. It develops skills such as listening, recollection, drawing, writing, collaboration and performance all in a single session!

• Start off by playing children my poem OOSHUS MAGOOSHUS, available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3nwMIWIgtY. Test the children's recollection skills by asking them if they remember (a) what Ooshus Magooshus eats, (b) where Ooshus Magooshus lives, and (c) what you should do if you encounter Ooshus Magooshus.

• Ask the children what sorts of things I didn't tell them about Ooshus Magooshus. The most important piece of information that is missing is what Ooshus Magooshus looks like. Ask the children to take a minute or so to close their eyes and imagine their own monsters, focusing specifically on what it looks like.

• Children go to their tables and ILLUSTRATE their monsters. They do not do any writing at this stage; they focus instead on doing the most colourful, fun, imaginative drawings they can. Tell them to imagine things such as the monster's legs, arms, eyes, face, teeth, etc, as well as what colour(s) it is. 

• Now comes a bit of a curveball. Go round the class and collect in the monster pictures, and go round redistributing them so that everyone has someone else's monster. The task now if to DESCRIBE the monsters they can see in front of them. This can either be done in books, or on the space around the monster. Depending on age, the description could be either a single sentence or a detailed paragraph. To ensure that interesting language is used, a couple of sentences can be MODELLED on the board. 

• Now comes the TEAMWORK. Hand out big sheets of paper, one per table. The children need to work together to turn their individual monster descriptions into a group poem. Ask each child to choose a sentence from the descriptions they have just written. Try and ensure that each child on the table is describing a different part or aspect of their monster. They then need to arrange their descriptions into a group poem, to be written up on the large sheet of paper (for younger children this could be scribed by the teacher; otherwise they need to work together to decide who is going to do it). They need to decide the order in which they want their lines to go. 

• Each group needs to REHEARSE the poems they have just written. They need to decide how they would like to perform it. Will one person do the reading, or will they take it in turns? Will people do actions? Will they add a chorus in between each line or couple of lines (for an example of a monster poem with a chorus, see my Zombie Poem).

• Lastly, it's the PERFORMANCE. Each group performs their poem to the rest of the class. If you like you can add a light element of COMPETITION by awarding a prize to the best group. (This doesn't have to be for the best performance; it could be for the group who works best together, or who tried the hardest to overcome some initial conflict. I always like to acknowledge this.)

I hope you've found this helpful. It should work well with primary children of all ages. I recommend that each child gets to keep the monster they illustrated, rather than the one they described. This is both because they are usually more emotionally attached to these critters, and because it will be useful for them to see how someone else has interpreted their work.

Have fun, and may Ooshus be with you!

New Model Poems

I have just started an MA in Writing/Education Studies at Goldsmiths College, University Of London. Assuming I complete it this will be my third degree. As part of the MA I am training to be a 'Spoken Word Educator', which will involve teaching teens about Spoken Word poetry. As someone who works primarily with younger children, and as someone who is only fairly peripherally involved in the London Spoken Word scene (the odd gig here and there, but usually I'm too knackered after performing for up to six hours in schools), this will be an interesting challenge for me. To use a slab of the kind of corporate jargon that I loathe, I am looking forward to 'diversifying'.

The Spoken Word Educator programme was piloted last year by an American educator called Peter Kahn. Last week myself and my fellow MA students read a couple of poems by him, entitled 'What It's Like To Be Nervous (For Those Of You Who Aren't)', and 'What It's Like To Be A Chicagoan In London' (For Those Of You Who Aren't)'. Peter uses these as model poems in class, encouraging students to write their own poems using the format 'What It's Like To Be X (For Those Of You Who Are Not-X'. I have written a couple such poems. Here they are. (WARNING: The second one contains swearing. I have not done this frivolously. I would obviously have to check with teachers before doing it in school.)

What It’s Like Starting Your First Day Of School (For Those Who Don’t Remember)

It’s being wrapped up like a polar bear

in your fluffy blue coat, protecting you

in your new adventure.

It’s Honey Nut Loops in a Tupperware box

at snack time, and a Marmite sandwich

for lunch.

It’s your new teacher telling you

you’re grown up now, and Sarah crying

all day long.

It’s trying not to have an accident,

and a red beach-ball of pride in your chest

when you don’t.

It’s air rushing out of a balloon

at the end of the day, and a new balloon

tomorrow. 

What It’s Like To Get Out Of Bed When You’re Depressed

It’s the weight of the room

pressing down on your chest, and heaviness

holding hostages in your throat.

It’s light charging under your blinds

like an invading army, occupying you,

and birds cursing the day

with their cynical songs.

It’s vomit in your stomach and shit in your brain.

It’s bullying voices telling you to get up,

and a set of leaden limbs

unable to obey.

It’s your mum crying outside your room, wondering

what she’s done wrong; your dad slamming

the door on his way to work.

It’s hot acid shampoo in the shower,

searing into your head and shoulders;

old clothes hung like sackcloth

across your scarecrow bones.

It’s standing in a field with

the day an open chasm before you.

It’s having arms with no joints,

so you can’t get the fallen fruit. 

Yucky Food List Poems - Fun, Quick Workshop Idea For All Ages

Yesterday I ran some workshops with Year 4 classes at Gospel Oak Primary in London. The writing exercise I set was over quicker than expected, so I had 10 minutes or so to play with. I asked the children to write list poems - a very easy thing for anyone to do - involving the most disgusting culinary concoctions they could think of. Some examples included:

 - owl soup
 - felt and chips
 - fizzy moose brains
 - warts with jelly
 - paper omelette

This is a very fun exercise, which stretches the imagination. It can be made as long or as short as you like, and engages even the most reluctant writers. The class were in uproarious laughter when a selection of children read out their poems. I thoroughly recommend giving it a go!

(PS, it might be an idea to specify no poo, wee or sick...)

Catching Words - Literacy Project With Discover Children's Story Centre

I have just completed the first of eight sessions as part of the 'Catching Words' project, in association with Discover Children's Story Centre in Stratford, East London. I am working to produce poetry with Year 2 at St Antony's RC Primary School, in Newham.

I normally get a feel for a school quite quickly, and St Antony's is lovely - the teachers are dedicated, and the children enthusiastic and boisterous. Year 2 have always been one of my favourite ages to perform for, as they are old enough to understand things (and to join in during the correct parts of my poems!) but young enough that they were willing to get involved without any of the cynicism that occasionally creeps in in later years. However, sometimes with children of this age it can be a struggle to get them to be focused and productive in workshops. This was not the case today. I was impressed with the work that each child produced, and the fun they seemed to have along the way.

Today's workshop involved creating animal-based similes, which the children turned into group poems. In preparation for the workshop I wrote the children their very own poem. Here it is:

I’m Like

I’m like a cheeky monkey

When I’m standing on my head

I’m like a stubborn mule

Because I will not go to bed

I’m like a messy pig

Because my room is like a sty

I’m like a grumpy elephant

Because I sometimes cry

I’m like a dashing cheetah

When I’m darting home from school

I’m like a graceful dolphin

When I’m swimming in the pool

I’m like a lazy lion

When I’m lying in the sun

And being like an animal

Is such a lot of fun!