Poetry Power: how to bring poetry into your classroom and why you should
Laura Hulme, teacher at Devonshire Park Primary School in Birkenhead, explains the impact reading Matt Goodfellow’s The Final Year had on her and her class, and in particular, the impact of realising that this was poetry “that sounds like us.”
The award ceremony for the CLiPPA, CLPE Children’s Poetry Award, is a highlight on the poetry calendar. Held at the National Theatre on London’s Southbank, shortlisted poets perform live on stage as do winners of the CLiPPA Shadowing scheme, which encourages schools to explore the shortlisted collections and support pupils to create poetry performances of their favourites.
The winning performers this year included Daisy, Faith and Amelia, Year 6 students at Devonshire Park Primary School, Birkenhead. The girls performed the poem, ‘Ya Need to Be Able to Pin This Down‘, from Matt Goodfellow’s verse novel, The Final Year, which went on to win this year’s CLiPPA.
The Final Year is probably one of the most powerful books I have ever taught to a group of children. In fact, it is the most powerful book. It tells the story of Nate, navigating Year 6 while coping with some tough issues at home, including potential tragedy when his little brother falls seriously ill. It’s set in East Manchester, a place Matt Goodfellow knows very well from his own childhood and years as a primary school teacher there, and the landscape he depicts is one that is familiar too to our students.
Wow, can you write like this?” they said, “It sounds like us.” I explained that poetry allows you to write what you want, and that the whole point of it is that it does sound like them, that there doesn’t need to be a checklist
When I first told the class the book was narrative through poetry, they were pretty dismissive: poetry is just rhymes, it’s for little kids, was the response. Their view quickly changed when we started reading the book together: “This could genuinely be Birkenhead,” they said, “This is what it’s like to grow up here and to be a part of Year 6 getting ready for high school.”
Matt chose to write the book in Nate’s (and his own) Manchester dialect, and that decision had a powerful effect on my class and on their own writing. “Wow, can you write like this?” they said, “It sounds like us.” I explained that poetry allows you to write what you want, and that the whole point of it is that it does sound like them, that there doesn’t need to be a checklist, a semicolon here, and parenthesis there, and commas for clarity. I said, “I want your writing to be the most realistic form of you on a page that it can be.”
Having to conform to standard spoken English almost alienates children in schools like ours and in the northwest of England, where we have a strong accent, which also provides a really strong sense of identity. They fully embraced the freedom to write as themselves.
The CLiPPA Shadowing gave them added reason to perform too. The opportunity of performing at the National Theatre in London opened their eyes to the avenues that were available to them if they really worked hard at it. The winning performance was all down to Daisy, Amelia and Faith: they collected all their props, practiced together, they rehearsed, created their routine. It was wonderful to see them come together over something that came to mean so much to them, not only as this group of girls but as a class.
I believe that reading Matt’s poetry has made this cohort of children recognise that they themselves are capable poets and capable writers and performers. And for me, that’s what’s been so powerful.
Find out more about the CLiPPA from CLPE and here are CLPE’s tips on sharing poetry with your class.
Listening to poetry
The best way to engage children in poetry is to make sure they hear a wide range of poetry as often as possible. It is important to hear and feel the distinct rhythms of different voices and dialects, and to see that poetry comes in different forms and can be written by a range of different people. Poets like Valerie Bloom, Joseph Coelho, Matt Goodfellow, Kate Wakeling and Nikita Gill show children a range and breadth of voices and styles that exist in children’s poetry and serve as inspiration for pupils to perform and write poetry of their own.
Reading poetry
Look at the poetry collections and anthologies on offer in your reading environment and in your curriculum. Ensure that collections for children show what poetry is and what it could be with a range of poetic forms and covering a range of themes and styles. Rhyming poetry can be supportive for early readers and offer a wealth of opportunity for exploring language, as well as being fun to perform, but it’s important to remember that children’s poetry doesn’t always have to rhyme. Ensure your selections introduce children to new poets, voices and styles they may not meet through their own reading. Use the CLiPPA shortlists to discover the best new poetry.
Give time for children to read and reflect on poems read
Children need time to read, re-read and respond to poetry.
A technique like ‘poetry papering’ works really well. Select different poems, illustrating different poets, styles and forms. Photocopy the poems and pin them up around the classroom or another space for the children to find and explore at their leisure. They can read, pass over, move on and then select one they’d like to talk about with someone else. This encourages the children to enjoy the experience of simply reading a poem, to relish the uncertainties of meanings and the nature of the knowledge and emotional responses that poems invoke in them as readers.
Perform Poetry
Children need to feel the joy in reading poetry aloud, joining in, dramatising and performing poems themselves. If poetry is not given a voice, if it just stays on the page as a printed object, then it is not going to come alive for most children.
Performing poetry is a fantastic way of developing reading fluency, giving the chance for children to read and re-read poems, working to express the meaning behind the words by using their voices in different ways, understanding how intonation and prosody can help translate this to an audience.
Find opportunities for children to perform poetry themselves, to shadow an award, like the CLiPPA, enter recitation competitions or simply perform poems they love in school. Allow children to decide for themselves how best to organise the performance, whether they think it would be best to perform individually, in pairs, or if they want to work as a group.
Work alongside professional poets
Seeing a poet bring their own work to life and beginning to understand what that means in terms of the creation of poetry helps children to see themselves as writers. A visit from a poet brings this experience directly to the children and can be hugely enriching and inspiring.
Teachers who book poet visits talk about the enjoyment and engagement of the children and the impact on their confidence as well as their reading, performance and writing ability.
Give time, space and opportunities for children to write their own poetry
Children need the permission and opportunities to share and write about themselves, their feelings, the world around them and important events in their own voices. Through writing poetry, children are encouraged to reflect on their experience, to recreate it, shape it, and make sense of it. In a poem, it is possible to give form and significance to a particular event or feeling and to communicate this to the reader or to the listener.
