At the end of November all full-time students aged 7-13 took part in Wendover’s first Poetry Week. During the first session of the week all students and teachers came together to hear me talk about different styles of poetry, read some of my favourite poems and explain the outline for the week.
Creative Curriculum
It was so wonderful to see teachers of most subjects getting involved and bring poetry into so many different areas of the curriculum. Throughout the week, the children had experience of writing poetry in different languages, about topics in Science such as plants and eggs and even produced poetry about maths concepts! Our teachers are so open-minded and creative in their approach to teaching the curriculum so loved the challenge of including poetry into their lessons for the week.
So many styles!
We wanted to make the poetry week as open as possible and didn’t dictate any style of poetry or theme for the week. This enabled the children to write about something they had an interest in and were passionate about. Children of different ages and abilities learnt about styles and skills appropriate to their age and ability; some children created poems with alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhyming couplets and others looked deeper at imagery skills like similes, metaphors and personification.
Performance Poetry
The end of the week was magical! We all gathered to view everyone’s poetry and the children confidently and expressively read their poems to their peers. After the readings, the children wrote comments on the screen with their thoughts about each individual poem.
Here are some quotes from the children’s thoughtful and positive comments:
‘good use of senses’
‘elegant and beautiful’
‘amazing language choice’
‘I love your similes’
‘I love your line about rain bringing courage to the thunder’
‘Your rhyming is great’
‘I love your alliteration, you read it so well’
‘I love how it ends with willow like the title’
‘I really enjoyed trying to do a poem in every lesson but by far my favourite part was the sharing session at the end where we wrote what we enjoyed about other people’s poems.’ – Oscar
Inspired creativity
It has been lovely to hear that the children have continued their enjoyment for poetry since ‘Poetry Week’. Lots of the children have continued to write poetry in their spare time and have included poems in project work they have completed. How lovely our week has ignited a passion for writing!
Looking forward to the next one!
We are so proud of the enthusiasm the children showed and the wonderfully creative writing that was produced! Not only did the children learn new poetry techniques and have exposure to a variety of different poets and styles of poetry but the children worked on their performance poetry skills and their confidence performing to others. Our online school is such an encouraging and supportive environment to be a part of and this final session really illustrated this. We look forward to the next one!
‘It was fun because when you shared the poem with the class you got really nice comments.’ – Matilda
‘It was very fun, we got to listen to amazing poetry. I like to listen to people read.’ – Sofi
‘Shape poems are fun and you can pretty much do anything for poetry.’ – Leon
