A Poetry Teacher's Toolkit

Book 1: Words and Wordplay

Collette Drifte, Mike Jubb

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781134139811
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Professional poets spend many hours crafting a finished piece of work, yet we expect children in school to sit down and write when they are told to, whether they feel inspired or not. This series of four books is a toolkit to help you build a positive framework for children to read, write, understand and enjoy poetry - to bring a creative spark to the poetry classroom. A combination of featured poems, creative ideas, structured lesson plans and differentiated photocopiable activity sheets gives the series a uniquely flexible approach - which means you can use the materials in any classroom context.

If you're wary of poetry, if you think it's boring, or if you're nervous about teaching poetry, then you've chosen the right book.

Key themes covered in BOOK 1: Words and Wordplay are playing with words; making patterns with words; words and meanings; puns and puzzles; how words affect readers; moods, feelings and attitudes; and how poets manipulate words.

Other books in the series are: BOOK 2: Rhymes, Rhythms andRattles; BOOK 3: Style, Shape and Structure; and BOOK 4:Language and Performance.

1 This Writing Business

Featured poems

Writer’s Block by Helen White

The Water Poem by Nicholas Shannon

Writer’s Workshop by Michaela Morgan

Everyone Can Be a Writer by Mike Jubb

Instructions for Growing Poetry by Tony Mitton

Swimming in a Sea of Words by Jane Clarke

Can’t Think! by Olivia van Zwanenberg

Words by Robert Louis Stevenson

‘But Eeyore was saying to himself, “This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.’” (A. A. Milne)

Well, that’s one view of writing, but the following one is nearer the truth:

‘Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.’ (Gene Fowler)

Writer’s Block by Helen White (p. 34) pretty well sums up the frustration of wanting to be creative, and yet not quite being able to … and Olivia van Zwanenberg certainly had the problem identified at the age of ten, judging by her poem Can’t Think! (p. 40).

The Water Poem by Nicholas Shannon (p. 35) aged 13 (now pushing 30, at the time of this edition!), is a remarkably mature piece that captures the familiar struggles, witnessed by teachers, of a class of children suffering the devilish pains of trying to write creatively. I’m going to take a closer look at this poem at the end of the chapter but, for now, I’d like to draw your attention to the insightful line, ‘outside a locked larder of ideas’, and to the equally telling (and sad) observation that ‘Most just try to fill the page’. This kid knew what he was talking about!

The aim of this chapter is to make a start on the unlocking of that larder in children and, hopefully, you the teacher/writer. Michaela Morgan’s Writer’s Workshop (p. 36) rejoices in some of the tools and ingredients that can be used to cook up a poem, once the larder is unlocked.

But first, as Jane Clarke writes in Swimming in a Sea of Words (p. 39) you have to take the plunge. Paddling in the shallows, by which she means thinking too much, just gives you a headache. You need to ‘dive straight into the sea of words’; take a risk; go for it; get something down on paper as quickly as possible. Once you’ve done that, you can ‘stop to think’; decide what is worth keeping and what to chuck out; redraft.

* * *

You have to put on a whiny voice for this: ‘Don’t know what to write, Miss. Can’t think of anything.’ Sound familiar? It does to many children, and it certainly does to me, because I can remember saying exactly those things, in exactly that tone of voice, when I was at school. Even worse, I can remember my Year 6 teacher (or fourth year junior as we called it in the 1950s) saying, ‘Jubb, you haven’t got a single idea in your head, have you?’ And I believed him, just as plenty of children believe it of themselves today. Low confidence is a killer to creativity. Can’t take the chance … too risky.

The truth is my teacher didn’t know what he was talking about. He knew little or nothing about the writing process – or about art in general, come to that. Here’s a shortened version of the proof that I like to present to children in order to persuade them that EVERYONE has loads to write about.

When a baby is born, they don’t know very much – but they learn very quickly, largely through their senses. In computer terms, their senses input to their hard drive (or floppy disc in my case!). By the time kids reach Key Stage 2, they must have had millions of sensory inputs. They know what dogs look like, what a baby crying sounds like, what chocolate tastes like, what rain feels like, what a chip shop smells like.

Then there’s direct experience: everything from being told off for something that wasn’t their fault, to finding their hamster dead in its nest. All this is proof positive that no child has a shortage of things to write about. So to indicate that I was, or any child is, empty headed is clearly to misunderstand the nature of the problem.

There is a problem, but it isn’t a lack of material in any child’s head. The problem is: how to get the material out of the child’s head. Many children, after they’ve run out of all the displacement activities they can devise, just sit there staring at a blank piece of paper … ‘thinking’. They are ‘outside a locked larder of ideas’. That’s a familiar experience to many professional writers too.

Imagine playing football that way. You bring the ball to the middle of the pitch, place it on the centre spot and you … go and make a cup of coffee, do the washing up, take the dog for a walk. And when you’ve done all that, you stand there looking at the ball and think about playing football with it. No, you don’t. You give the ball a kick straight away. We call it ‘The kick-off’. And really, it doesn’t matter so much where the kick-off goes, because during the next 90 minutes the ball’s going to be booted all over the place. But, the kick-off is the most important kick of the whole match … well, if someone doesn’t kick it for the first time, it stays where it is and you ain’t got no game.

The lesson for would-be writers is shocking, but clear: thinking about writing prevents you from writing. You need to get on with it. You need to get into the game. What’s more, you need to get into the game without worrying about what’s going to happen in the second half. You need a writing kick-off. And you need a draft book to make mistakes in.

‘I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.’ (Don Marquis)

Kick-offs

‘The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.’ (Robert Cormier)

WRITING ACTIVITY: One word at a time

This is a whole-class activity, with you acting as scribe at the flipchart. Tell the children that you’re not writing a poem, you’re not writing a story, you’re just writing … something, but you don’t know what yet.

You put up the first word, then each child in turn has to add one word as quickly as possible; it must make grammatical sense, but otherwise just follow where the piece leads. Anyone can put in punctuation before adding their word if they want to.

Relax them and make it clear that this is for fun. Apart from the need for appropriate parts of speech, there is no right and wrong. The outcome isn’t important as such. Children who hesitate can be asked, ‘What could come next?’ But we’re aiming for S P E E D here. (For more about calligrams, see A Poetry Teacher’s Toolkit Book 3, Ch. 3.)

The kids will love this game; there’ll be loads of enthusiasm and anticipation. You’re bound to have some of them trying to influence the choice of others, but that’s your problem. Once they’ve got the hang of it, you can start getting them to have a go in their groups, then in threes, then pairs. No rubbers, no spellings. Confidence builds if they don’t think the outcome is CRUCIAL.

I have just dragged my two ‘teenmonsters’ from whatever vital activity they were engaged in to have a go. This is what we came up with in about 90 seconds (Nicky’s contribution is in bold, Kevin’s is in italics):

One day there was some delicious raspberries in the back of the car. Katie ate a raspberry and felt peculiar because she had eaten a magical raspberry. She then started to spin faster and faster until she woke up in a ditch and realised what must have happened.

(I’m a bit embarrassed about ‘was some’ from my Year 11 daughter, but then she did rescue us with ‘magical’.) If the piece runs out of steam, start another one. Give it a go.

WRITING ACTIVITY: One sentence at a time

This is a similar idea, but each child has to give a whole sentence. It is worth trying ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• The Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A ‘Must Read’ Chapter!
• 1 This Writing Business
• 2 Give Me Your Word
• 3 Weighing with Plurds
• Further Reading
• Glossary
• Index