This year’s National Poetry Day in on the 4th October, and that is some way down the teaching line.
But it isn’t.
It is in terms of months away from this posting – 4 months – though perhaps not as much as one might initially think, and it is in terms of workload and current commitments: primary school teachers may feel more inclined to consider now having hurdled the first part of Key Stage 2 testing [though there are many traps yet ahead], and secondary school teachers – the main target for this work, but not entirely – still have GCSEs to pass through.
It isn’t in terms of, hopefully, seeing something positive on the horizon. And it isn’t in terms of having some time between now and October to look at and consider if these poetry writing ideas would be useful and welcome for your classroom.
As an English teacher, I always celebrated National Poetry Day. Since leaving the job, I have always devised teaching/creative writing ideas for others to use, if they wished, on National Poetry Day. For a number of years these appeared with Teachit. Lately I have promoted them through this blog.
Enough of the prompt and history. This is an initial launch and promotion. I will be hoping those interested will also share/promote/retweet, especially those with an ‘audience’. I will over the next four months be adding to this work – especially producing teacher notes and perhaps student sheets – and I will also be re-posting, especially nearer the 4th of October.
What hasn’t changed in this thematic National Poetry Day theme of Change is my commitment to presenting creative writing ideas that can be ‘copied’: models for writing to provide actual forms to emulate; to copy. I often use list poems as that main form – it works! – and I also encourage experimental forms, like cut-up/remix poetry.
The following are pdfs of the creative writing ideas for the theme of Change. No notes yet, but I trust they give a flavour of the focus. If you click on these, they can be downloaded and reproduced/use as you will. These are free resources to use and share: nothing would give me greater pleasure than to think students will be encouraged to write and be supported in that by the models given here.
With all future postings on this, I will use [NPDChange] in the heading so this can be searched on this blog and all resources found together:
D – Search engine change titles
I have added the following since this morning’s posting as an example of the Student Sheets I will be producing. There will be a singular Teacher Notes with suggestion and guidance for presenting the ideas. These will all be offered as support/guidance – they obviously do not have to be used [and/or they can be changed! I can be advised if it will be useful to make all of this available as word documents for the facility to amend?]:
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