Planning Creative Literacy Lessons

Andrew Lambirth

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136607417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

This book builds on the guidance given by the Primary Strategy for Literacy. By 'filling in the gaps' that the planning documentation leaves, the book provides teachers with the structures and ideas to plan creatively and effectively for their children whilst following and enhancing the recommendations of the strategy. It includes:

• clear and practical ways to plan units of work that embrace reading, writing, speaking and listening, in exciting and active ways
• examples of effective practice using children's work that highlight the effects of creative planning
• suggestions for texts and resources that can be included in half-termly and termly planning.

Written by a team of leading educationalists and teacher educators in the primary literacy field, this edited collection is a must-have for primary teachers wishing to inject creativity into the planning of their literacy lessons.

What is the role of poetry and language play in young children's learning and, as significantly, in their emotional and social well-being? This chapter draws on research from a wide range of sources, including scientific research, to provide a background to the selection and use of poetic texts with Foundation Stage children. Motivation and engagement will be prime features to be considered, with particular attention given to natural, uninhibited, often creative, play, and drawing on children's intrinsic desire to learn within a social, cultural context. The importance of language play in young children's cognitive development is a continuous and vital thread throughout the chapter. In addition, an important aspect of any planning in our rich, multi-ethnic, diverse society is how to include children from a range of communities, traditions, experiences and achievements, so this will also be focused upon. Practical suggestions are included, based on these pedagogical assumptions.

In every society, in every century, poetry and song have been a fundamental part of human existence: chants and rhythms, rhymes and repetitions, narratives and refrains are all part of the joy and sorrow that make up our lives. There are the Negro spiritual songs of slaves, physically bound and tethered, whose words and music still soared freely; the chants of latter-day holy men and modern-day football supporters; the poignancy of the emotions and images of the war poets; and the laughter of tongue-twisters, riddles and word play that tickle our senses. The barriers between different cultures and societies can be broken down by a willingness to share the language bonds of rhythm and rhyme. On a trip along the Nile, for instance, a group of middle-aged, middle-class, English tourists and Egyptian guides were united and delighted by the elegant Nubian oarsman when he taught a traditional, repetitious chant to the gentle beat of his drum. At that time, in that setting, the poem brought smiles of pleasure and feelings of peace and harmony, but its memory and revival can generate the same emotions in a different place and time.

Poetry evokes a physical and emotional response that taps into something primeval and deep-rooted in our natures. During his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney (1995) referred to the compelling power that poetry has over human response: 'The energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza' (http://nobelprize.org/nobel/nobel-foundation/publications/lesprix.html (6 December 2004). This energy is so potent that a poem can be responsible for creating gales of laughter or tears of sadness, regret and remorse, through a careful, deliberate juxtaposition of words evoking warmth, mystery, beauty, fear or cruelty.

A poem can encapsulate our own feelings and articulate them even when we are unable to find a voice: for a colleague who had recently suffered the death of his father there was solace in Philip Larkin's elegy to his father, 'And Yet' (The Times, 10 August 2004). How often do we unconsciously draw on the language of Shakespeare when our own words are inadequate? According to Bernard Levin (1986):

If you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare. (The Times, 10 August 2004)

Language play

The genius of Shakespeare has become part of our lingua franca and there is no self-consciousness or social class barrier that restricts the use of his currency; it crosses cultural boundaries. The precision and economy of words in other rhymes and couplets, elegies and odes, puns, riddles, chants, and in contemporary newspaper headlines and catchphrases are all part of a vibrant cultural and multicultural heritage that permeates the lives of successive generations. They draw us together, they are exciting, fresh and fluid, they connect us with the past as well as celebrating the present, and they forge links between different cultures and traditions. The language play of market traders, whose repertoire includes references to popular television phrases, such as 'Cheaper than Asda', and (even recently) 'Lovely jubbly', have been the source of great amusement during my own travels to countries as diverse as Turkey, Egypt, India and Malaysia. They exemplify the effects of global communications and the common humanity that bubbles to the surface through humour and shared understandings.

Moreover, in the same way that a scent or a piece of music can transport us to another place or time, poetry can be an intoxicating reminder of an almost forgotten experience. The poet Sue Cowling (2002) says that her poem 'Leaves' reflects 'A sound, a feeling and an image' within its few short lines. This resonates with my own joyful memories of the laughter of my two-and-a-half-year-old son when I hear the simple tongue-twister 'Red lorry, yellow lorry'. Although he is now an adult, I can clearly picture him painting the bedroom walls with his bucket of watered-down emulsion, and the pleasure we both took in the language play that grew from a desire to keep him occupied while I gave the ceiling its fresh coat of paint.

This memory has, however, more significance than its ability to help me recapture memories of my son's early years or parental distraction techniques; the shared pleasure of the language play that we engaged in on this and many other occasions contributed to his general literacy acquisition and the development of specific linguistic skills. As an adult, he is a competent wordsmith, able to craft sentences and aware of the power of written language, but also a confident oral language user who can engage and entertain others, or defuse a situation with his quickfire humour and his ability to form unexpected connections between words and images.

Recently, my three-year-old nephew has been just as delighted by the games we play with rhyming stories, particularly those accompanied by an action or incorporating his name, such as Ahlberg's (1989) Each Peach Pear Plum, which became: 'Each, peach, pear, plum; I spy Tom's tum'.

Language play of this sort has timeless appeal because it is a continuation of the natural rhythms of language acquisition, the repetitions of early sounds that babies chant, such as 'dad-dah'. While young children learn the sounds and linguistic patterns of their culture instinctively and spontaneously, adults and older children unconsciously and informally contribute through their observed discourse, and by responding to and incorporating baby babble into established words and phrases.

When children's wonder and inventiveness is maintained and nurtured, they become more adventurous and creative in their explorations of language and its images. Crystal (1998 : 180) examined a number of studies in an attempt to discover 'why the playful (or "ludic") function of language is important for our appreciation of language as a whole'. He concluded that:

Language play, the arguments suggest, will help the development of pronunciation ability through its focus on the properties of sounds and sound contrasts, such as rhyming. Playing with word endings and decoding the syntax of riddles will help the acquisition of grammar. Readiness to play with words and names, to exchange puns and to engage in nonsense talk, promote links with semantic development.

There is a corpus of research evidence, from Goswami and Bryant (1990), Raban (1998) and Pinker (1994) which convinces us that the ludic language of children should be valued and that recognition should be given to the part it plays in literacy development. Although the natural glee of young children when playing with sounds, alliteration and repetition is easily observed - and may be, paradoxically, because of its association with pleasure and fun - the cognitive and creative benefits of such joyous moments are often overlooked. When we analyse the behaviours of many of the most competent readers and writers in our classrooms we find that their sophisticated use of language and confidence to play with its rules are distinctive. They are able to dissect words and reformulate them, to reorganise language and create new sentences that reflect their own ideas, and experiment with their own thoughts and views. Such linguistic competence undoubtedly has long-term benefits and implications for adult life: we have only to consider the popularity of those people who entertain us with their ability to turn images on their heads in their comedy routines, or catchphrases, or persuasive, pervasive advertising jingles and headlines.

Despite this significance and the deeply meaningful human effects of poetry and language play, they often remain a sidelined, undervalued part of our literacy curriculum, and many children do not experience their enrichment. It is widely believed that our emotional lives are an integral part of our intellectual and creative lives, so to limit the diet that is offered can have damaging consequences. However, the nourishment that is derived from poetry does not come through a sterile or formulaic curriculum where its different forms are dissected and analysed.

As widely documented by educationalists such as Grainger (1996) and Lambirth (2002), real learning comes through personal and shared engagement in the images, tempo and timbre of the language, and from the lived experience of performing poems. Therefore, our classrooms need to be places where poems are memorised, recited, appreciated and celebrated on a personal and social level, in individual and group contexts. The focus, when encouraging children to memorise a favourite poem, is not on learning it by rote but on responding to the pictures and feelings it induces, interpreting its linguistic composition and beat.

While the National Literacy Strategy (DfEE 1998) makes suggestions as to the type of poetry that is taught, term-by-term, year-by-year, it is important that we treat these as the guidance they were apparently intended to be rather than as directives determining our choices. Planning should begin with the rhymes and songs that particular and different groups of children know and love, extending and building on the familiar patterns of their childhoods. Immersion in the genre, as argued throughout this book, is essential for reading development and as a basis for the children's compositions because an awareness of the structures and conventions frees them to be adventurous with their own imaginings. So, too, is a physical and mental space in which children feel confident and at liberty to try, as Craft (2001: 58) states, 'playing with ideas and new possibilities/combinations'. She argues, in a similar vein to Crystal (1998), that it is through play that fresh openings occur, and that 'early opportunities to play and playing are essential for developing creative adults' (ibid.: 9)

The need to observe and respond to young children's play and interests is now extensively accepted as the most effective and natural way to plan for their learning, and the statutory Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (2000) promotes this view. Observing and building on children's linguistic experimentation and creativity is as valuable, or more so, as assessing their speaking and listening competence. We can use the insights gained to extend the learning, to stimulate and support further investigations and materials.

Of course, this has to be managed sensitively so that we do not kill the inherent motivation that generates it, but Meek (1991) and others, including Lambirth (2002) and Whitehead (2002), have convincingly argued for the integration of language play into our classrooms and demonstrated how worthwhile this can be:

The metalinguistic awareness that the experts say is the mark of a good early reader and the risk-taking of young writers is born in speech games, the nonsense rhyme, the topsy-turvy of re-inventing the familiar, and all the lore and language and private subversions that children make up with words. (Meek 1991 : 91)

Through many years' experience of teaching four- and five-year-olds in reception classes, and a brief but recent experience of teaching young children in southern India for whom English is a second language, I have become committed to the notion that we need to be responsive in our interactions with children: to 'read' their faces and body language, to identify the confusion or excitement and adapt accordingly. If we continue instead with our own agendas and predetermined, i...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introductory chapters
• Units of Work
• Index