poems – Page 2

What did we get up to this week? Pacing and imagery for Zoom, poetry for schools!

Welcome parents, carers and young writers. Every week I will post here what we have been up to in writing clubs. The clubs are categorised by day so if your child attends a Tuesday club, for example, simply scroll down to Tuesday to see what we covered this week!

Monday

Monday Zoom Club: Today they had a choice of discussing pacing or imagery. They could choose between the topics or work on both if they had time. We discussed what pacing is and had examples of how to increase pacing to fast or slow within a story or within a scene. We then had four activities to choose from to practice writing fast or slow paced scenes. Or if they chose imagery, we also briefly reminded ourselves what imagery is and gave some examples and they had four options to choose from for responding. Well done to everyone – we had some wonderful sharing of fast and slow paced writing, which was lovely to analyse and also helpful to anyone unsure. We also had some great responses to the imagery topic, with more writing being shared from that!

Monday CJS Club: We looked at poetry today and they could choose between list poetry, Haikus and acrostic poems. I talked them through each type of poem first and it was great that we had a real mix of different responses. I took in The Lost Words, by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris to show them such beautiful examples of more complex acrostic poetry. Here are some examples:

Tuesday

Tuesday Zoom Club: They chose to tackle pacing rather than imagery and came up with some great examples of slow and fast paced writing.

Tuesday Bransgore C of E Primary: Back to poetry for the after school group! A choice of acrostic, haiku and list poems and again we had a lovely mix of all. I absolutely loved the three nature based poems one child wrote after being inspired by The Lost Word! We had also had some very good rhyming poems!

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 plus Zoom club: We discussed both pacing and imagery today – in particular ‘showing’ vs ‘telling’ in writing. Everyone had a go at either writing a random scene that was slow, fast or mixed, or carrying on with a on-going project and sharing an extract to discuss whether the scene is fast, slow or mixed. Fantastic work!

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom club: We looked at imagery, and in particular ‘showing’ vs ‘telling’. This was a new concept for some of them and they handled it brilliantly with plenty of curiosity and enthusiasm! They managed to liven up my boring ‘telling’ sentences by rewriting them into ‘showing’ sentences that were far more engaging! Well done guys!

Wednesday CJS club: back to poetry again! We had a lovely mix of rhyming poems, acrostic poems, haiku and list poems from this group today! Absolutely brilliant. Here are some examples:

Great work everyone!

Have a lovely half-term and I will see you all the week after!

What did we get up to this week? Found poetry and found song-writing!

Monday

Monday Zoom Group: This week our Monday Zoom group were the first to kick off the found poetry/song-writing topic. Most of the children are familiar with found poetry and the many different ways you can do it, but we started with a brief explanation and reminder. Today they had a few options available.

I copy and pasted random cut-up lyrics from real songs and put them in the chat. They could then use it to create either a poem, a song or a piece of flash fiction if they preferred. They could take whole sentences from the chat and rearrange them to create something new, or they could take single words, or just ideas.
They could go around their house and look for words and phrases to construct a piece of writing from. Examples could be book titles, newspaper headlines, snippets of news and radio conversations, posters and signs etc.

I rather threw them in at the deep end with slightly too many lyrics in the chat, which I ended up reducing for the rest of the Zoom clubs! But we had some fantastic results, including a number of inventive limericks, and some wonderful poems/songs using lyrics from the chat to inspire .

Monday Christchurch Junior School: A slightly different approach for the school clubs. I took in a box of cut up words and phrases from magazines which they could use for found poetry or song-writing. Most of them are also familiar with this technique. But to inspire song-writing I wrote out random lyrics from a few songs about music (I Still Believe by Frank Turner, She Bangs The Drums by The Stone Roses and American Pie by Don McClean) These were written on larger strips of coloured paper they could then move around to suit themselves. Several children armed themselves with piles of strips and found a quiet corner or floor space to construct a song or poem with. We also had some lovely found poetry and it was notable how much better they were having done it before. For example, many were not just choosing random words now, they were choosing words that went together or created a theme. Check out some fantastic examples below!

Tuesday

Tuesday Zoom Group: The 11 plus Zoom group also responded to the lyric challenge and all of them chose to use the random lyrics in the chat to create something new. We had a wonderful poem, a very atmospheric song, and an eerie piece of flash fiction that cleverly connected to previous ones by the same author. Well done everyone!

Tuesday Bransgore C of E Primary School: Bransgore also had a play with strips of lyrics spread out on tables and the floor plus the usual found poetry snippets of words and phrases they are used to. We also had a lovely combination of songs, poems and small pieces of fiction. Here are a few examples.

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 plus Zoom group: A huge well done to this group, who all tackled the lyric found poetry/song-writing challenge with great curiosity and enthusiasm. We had a wonderful mixture of songs, poems and pieces of flash fiction from taking random lyrics and using them to spark off ideas! Well done everyone.

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom group: Some of this group are new to found poetry but took to it with an open mind and gave it a go! Fantastic attitude. They had the same lyrics as the older and mixed age groups and did a truly spectacular job. We had several small and very thought-provoking poems, a song that the author hopes to write piano music to go with, a piece of flash fiction that showed true mastery of language, pacing and atmosphere and a really fun little poem created from the objects and words around them. Everyone did so well!

Wednesday Christchurch Junior School: These guys had the same strips of lyrics and random words from magazines and the option of writing songs, poems of pieces of flash fiction. We had a lovely selection of all and I was very impressed by everyone! Here are a few examples.