Poetry-Friendly Classroom, Clip #4

You create an instant Poetry Show. You divide the class up into threes and fours and each group chooses a book of poems and a poem from inside the book. Then in twenty minutes they choose a poem to present to the rest of the class.

They can do this in any way they like so it could be reading the whole poem together, or it could be doing a mime and reading all or some of the poem. It could be taking a line or two and making up a song, or a dance to it. It could be dividing the poem up into different voices, solo and chorus. It could be using musical instruments and percussion of some kind.

Discuss with the children different ways they could perform poems: mime, dance, song, using instruments, cutting bits out of the poem, adding in repetitions that aren’t in the original poem, turning some of the scenes of the poem into a ‘tableau’ (ie where the children pretend to be a photo or a painting) and so on.