Poetry-Friendly Classroom, Clip #1

Without any explanation or questions being asked of the children, just try writing out a poem that interests you on to a very large piece of paper and sticking it up on the wall.

You could also put some post-its next to it, telling the children that they could write anything that they want on the post-it to do with the poem. This could be questions that they would like to ask anyone or anything that appears in the poem, or it could be a question that they would like to ask the poet.

At a later stage, you could all sit round and look at these slips of paper and see whether people have answers to any of the questions, see of they have anything to say in reply to anything on any of the post-its.

They could pretend to be the poet in order to answer the questions directed at the poet. If there were questions that were factual, they could come up with ways of finding these out, e.g. when did the poet live? After a week, take down that poem and put up another one.