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We asked our Teacher Trailblazers for their top tips for teaching
poetry. Heres what they came up with.
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poems for pleasure in the precious time you have with them. Try
shadowing the TS Eliot Prize with one of your sets or with just a
few students.
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pens, chairs, and let your students move freely around the space
for at least twenty minutes to read peers poetry left on tables;
participate alongside them, insist on silence, and you can
effectively turn your lesson into an exhibition, an event. Open a
discussion afterwards about what the students enjoyed; send them
out of the room on that positive high.
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Make the Library space and stock all about the students.
Ask them what they like about it and what would make them use it
more. Target some of the more reluctant students they might just
surprise you. Let them make stock recommendations, talk to them
about their favourite poets. Act on your promises, make changes.
And then plaster the walls in the students work our Library is
full of poems by our young writers, and these individuals are like
celebrities within the school.
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The magic of poetry Get your pupils to learn poems off-byheart it gives them the sense that reciting a poem can feel a lot
like casting a spell. Its also a homework that you dont have to
mark!
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For the love of poetry Fill the spare two minutes at the end
of a lesson by reading a poem without any work attached. Nothing
gives us a better sense of the fact that poetry is about making a
connection between people, not just making the grade in an
analytical essay.
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Explore different perspectives Use Matt Maddens
Exercises in Style to show students how exciting it can be to
look at the relatively mundane through a new pair of eyes. The
book is a worthwhile investment but Matts
website http://www.exercisesinstyle.com/ is a good way in.
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Use the internet to your advantage The web is a way of life
for your students and so use to engage them. Why not start with
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Develop imagery
One exercise which helps students develop their powers of
imagery is to give students an object written on a card, such as the
moon, a tree or the sun. Ask them to write three similes and pass
their book on. Every child adds a simile to their class mates books
for ten moves. The books are returned to the owners and then each
student uses the images as a bank in writing their own poem.
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Follow the advice of great poets
Some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be
found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well
written (William Wordsworth, 1805). Try to write a piece of
grammatical prose and cut it up into line-lengths.
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Use art, photographic images or a visit to the great
outdoors as a stimulus for ideas
Pupils love to select paintings to write responses to. The more
detailed the images are the better and pupils should be encouraged
to ask questions about the pictures and to map the results. What to
write about is often a problem; works of art help the ideas to flow.
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Stop making poetry scary
Too much emphasis is placed on poetry being difficult or
needing to have some profound meaning. Use simple workshop
exercises to make poetry fun, accessible and part of everyday
school life.
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Bring poets into the department
There are some fantastic poets out there who are brilliant at
teaching teachers to teach poetry.
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Imitate published poems, but write from experience
Most students seem to be more successful when they write about
something they have experienced which has had an emotional
impact. They are usually adept at collecting words and phrases to
express their feelings, but often need a structure on which to hang
their words; therefore allowing them to model their poem on a