For the the month of March, we focused on poetry in class. Poetry is one of those genres that can be difficult to teach/resource in my opinion. This post will go through the different activities we did, in hope to give you some ideas or inspiration.
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Week 1- hook, engage, immerse
With any genre, the first week is always spent hooking the children in and immersing them in different poetic language/styles. Below I’ll list some of the activities that we did.
Rhyming chains
Children worked in mixed ability groups to great rhyming chains for the words ‘fill’ and ‘water’ (more challenging). From there we discovered that not all rhymes need to follow the exact same spelling pattern, such as ‘water’ and ‘slaughter’.
From there we read a poem with and without rhymes and discussed what affect a rhyme has on the way a poem is read. Children read some poems aloud with a focus on expression and pace to make it flow.
Alliteration Games
Alliteration is a poetic technique that I wanted to introduce to my children. We looked at a book in the Horrid Henry series (one of their favourites) and I asked children to explore what all of the characters names had in common. Here is a FREE extract from a Horrid Henry book, if you’d like your children to locate alliteration themselves.
Moody Margaret, Perfect Peter, Horrid Henry.
Children then made their own names into alliteration too. They really enjoyed this and understood the concept of alliteration as a result.
What is a kenning?
To ease children into poetry gently, we focused on Kennings for the first week. I used this PowerPoint to introduce children to kennings (which they loved).
Children were then let explore Kennings themselves by writing simple one’s on post-it notes for the partners to guess what they were.
Challenge: add a clue with alliteration.
Carry out research on an animal
To link with Science, we carried out research on some Irish wildlife, finding out what these animals did, ate, where they lived etc. Children spent an entire lesson on laptops, finding out these facts for their Kenning.
By allowing the children to engage in the research themselves, they took charge of their own learning and were extremely motivated by the task.
The following day, they wrote their kenning on a template of that animal and aimed to include some alliteration too.
A very short post today, but I hope it has given you some ideas for a quick, easy week of poetry lessons. Find this unit pack here(it’s based on the Big African 5, rather than animals of Ireland). These lessons can be easily adapted to any animal/topic that you are covering.
For more posts on planning English lessons, check out this post: How to structure an English Lesson
Need a fantastic book for inspiration? Check this one out here!
