Poetry

Writing Poetry

The poet Judith Nicholls wrote that 'Children need to know that adults too, struggle with words' (Nicholls, 1990: 27). Modeling the writing of poetry (and other types of texts) is a vital aspect of a teacher's role both in primary and secondary English classes. This can be potentially frightening for any student teacher who wrote little in school and has avoided poetry since then. In my PGCE teaching, I aim to build student teachers' confidence through writing workshop activities which start slowly with writing single lines, metaphors and short forms like haikus, mesostics, riddles and limericks before moving on to free verse. Each writing activity involves collaborative work such as reading each other's lines aloud, asking questions and making suggestions about the drafts along with discussion about how activities might need to be scaffolded for some learners. Two good sources of writing workshop ideas are Wilson and Hughes (1998), for primary, and Yates (1999), for secondary. The Ofsted report (2007) comments that pupils they interviewed liked how poetry made them think or led them to take new directions in their writing. You could help student teachers to make this happen in their classrooms by:

Using paintings as a stimulus
Postcards of paintings are always a useful resource (as are bookmarked paintings from gallery websites for display on an IWB or double page spread photographs from The Guardian). Whatever your resource, ensure student teachers have plenty of choice. Use poems like 'Not my Best Side' (UA Fanthorpe) or 'I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro' (Moniza Alvi) as models. Lead the student teachers in to their writing with a series of structured questions to help them read the visual images and to explore different ways of seeing. Encourage the student teachers to look for new and interesting ways into exploring the image in front of them such as what would the canvas or the camera say about it? What does the wall where it hangs or the security guard who must protect it every day think of the painting? How does the person who was cropped out of the photograph feel?
Three resources which will give you further ideas are: Michael and Peter Benton's Painting with Words (1995) (provides structured activities for use with Yr 7 - 11 classes); Grace Nichols' Paint Me a Poem (contains poems written during her residency/workshops with primary aged children at Tate Britain); the National Gallery website (includes examples of activities and poems developed by poets and authors working with young people at the National Gallery).

What other writing activities could you use with student teachers?

Writing from an inanimate object's point of view
Jumpstart (Yates 1999) and the poem entitled 'A Jet-Lagged Pineapple Outside a Greengrocer's', written by Thomas Yates, originally inspired this activity. I think it works best if everyone is writing from a different point of view. Student teachers can be given a variety of short scenarios (such as a traffic cone on the M6 or a penny down the back of a sofa) to choose from as a focus or they can suggest their own. You could also give them some specific prompts or abstract questions to think about to help them animate their object.

Collapsed Poetry
The technique of collapsing texts was first developed by Millum and Warren (2001). Providing a word bank of all the words from a collapsed poem is a useful stimulus for exploring a poet's linguistic choices and for student teachers' own writing. They can use the words as a resource, selecting from them, arranging them how they like and adding their own punctuation. There are examples of collapsed poem activities on Blake's poetry in Bleiman and Webster (2005) and a sequence of activities using a collapsed version of 'Children's Song' by R.S. Thomas in Dymoke et al (2008).