Poetry-Friendly Classroom, Clip #12

When it comes to writing poems, I suggest that one way to think of this is to ask how can we create a time in which the children can gather some thoughts and ideas that we can use to make poems?

One way, is to think that the resources we have at hand are the things we say, or that other people say to us, the things we can see going on, the things we hear, the things we think, the things we feel, the things we are doing ourselves (if we are in the scene in question).

There are many routes to tap into this: using photos, paintings, other poems, a title, a situation, a feeling, a memory, a story that I've been told, a moment or scene from real life, a moment or a scene in a play or a novel, a piece of music and so on. If we ask a question for each of these 'resources', as I've called them, then we can pool the answers. So, let's say we started from a situation, like 'Breakfast Time at Home', and we ask: 'What can you see going on?' You can pool the answers on a big piece of paper and pin that up.

Same again for each of the others: saying (you and others), thinking, hearing, feeling, seeing going on, doing. So you end up with a series of big posters of all the things that people have come up with. This is a resource you can use to make poems, either class poems or individual ones because what you can do is choose lines from each of these big sheets of paper and put them together, so you have a saying, thinking, feeling, seeing, doing poem.

You can show - either by doing it yourself, or by comparing what you're doing with poems that have already been written and published - that you can make poems out of just one or two of these different 'resources'. So you could write a 'seeing' poem about breakfast. Or a 'saying' poem about breakfast. Or you could write a 'thinking and feeling poem interrupted by 'hearing''. And so on.

There are also ways in which you can introduce patterns to what you're writing, through rhythm, repetition and chorus. If you've got a poetry friendly classroom going then these are the 'secret strings' I've talked about that you've probably started to notice.

Using this range of words to describe writing: saying, seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, and impossible writing, actually gives you a range of very accessible ways of talking about poems that you read. You can spot how poets switch between these different senses.

You can also talk about what I've called 'Impossible Writing'. You can show that you can write things that don't make sense and yet in a funny way they do. Take 'Hey diddle diddle'. A cow jumps over a moon. A dish runs away with the spoon.

That's quite odd and is meant to be a bit funny, perhaps. But you can also do impossible writing about sad, scary or mysterious things. Like 'the bed started to eat me.' Or 'the sky bent down' or 'the lemon drove off.'

This gives us another resource, another way of thinking that we can introduce into 'real' situations, like breakfast or as a way of writing in itself, say, about autumn, or the market or whatever. In one workshop I did where we were looking at a sad scene in a photo, a child wrote: '..and the leaves called out my name.'
Don’t forget you can always write poems for your class or about your class and with your class.

Don’t forget there are fantastic resources to help you with poetry: you can invite a poet to come to your school, there’s bound to be poetry readings at a local book festival.

There are poetry CDs, videos and websites like the Poetry Archive