Juniors embrace National Poetry Day activities
Junior School pupils celebrated this year’s National Poetry Day – where the theme was ‘play’ – in a range of different and immersive ways.
Year 6 enjoyed exploring Rachel Rooney’s poem ‘Russian Doll’ by seeing how a simple children’s toy is used as a metaphor to explore identity.
The pupils embraced playing with hyphenated words – in the style of the poem – to write their own ‘Russian Doll’ poem about themselves and different aspects of their personality.
Pupil Alston L said: “I enjoyed how we got to dive deeper into our feelings and learn more about ourselves,” whilst Libby W added: “I enjoyed thinking of hyphenated phrases to describe the different emotions and parts of me.”
After examining Annie Fisher’s ‘The Fruitytoot Toot’, Year 4 boys and girls performed and created their own poem exploring rhyme.
Year 3 explored ‘Word Play’ by Michaela Morgan. After listening to and reading the poem out loud, they worked on making a performance in a small group. They then explored compound words and looked for more examples.
In pairs the children decorated a piece of bunting with illustrations using their examples – for example, a butterfly (a fly made out of butter) or a chatter box (a pair of teeth in a box).
Year 2 pupils skipped, jumped and used their bodies as percussion to find the rhythm of the poem ‘Skipping Rope Spell’.
They then explored the ‘artistic play’ of the poem and created a class poem linked to skipping rope play. They illustrated this with expressions they noticed as they skipped.
Finally, Reception children composed and performed their own ‘action’ poem after listening to pieces created by professional children’s poet Ian Bland.
