Exploring Creative Writing with Poems Aloud

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One of the things that I am most conscious that we don’t do enough of, is creative writing. It’s the one thing that I would say is always a niggle at the back of my mind when I assess whether we are covering enough with the children.

We do enjoy poetry and I was recently sent a copy of Poems Aloud by the wonderful Joseph Coelho and illustrated by Daniel Gray-Barnett. I thought this would be the perfect book to get us thinking about language in a different way and I wasn’t wrong.

About the Book

The book itself, Poem’s Aloud, celebrates the fact that poems are meant to be shared and read out loud. It’s packed with all manner of different poems from tongue twisters and riddles to poems that work to a crescendo and others that are purposely slow.

We started by taking the poems and reading them each, aloud, in turn. We then read the poems aloud in different ways to explore how it changed how we felt about the poems.

Performing the Poems

This book would be perfect for working with children in groups and getting them to think about the language and how they might perform them. The poems I used for this was Speedy Rocket and Slow Bear. As the names suggest, they benefit from being read quickly or slowly. We had great fun trying to read the fast poem slowly and the slow one quickly! It’s not as easy as you might think.

Looking at the language

We spent some time looking at the language used in the poems and we talked about concepts such as alliteration (zipping, zapping) and onomatopoeia in the poems. The children did a really good job of identifying the words and sections that we couldn’t help but read fast or slow and we agreed that the speedy rocket didn’t sound quite so speedy when we read it slowly and the slow bear poem lost it meaning when we raced through it.

Creating our own Poems

I then tasked the children with writing a fast poem. First I challenged them to think of some fast words. Whenever I do things like this I find it useful to give them a pack of sticky notes each and they write one word onto the note and stick it onto the table. I think they find it easier to add one word or phrase to the sticky notes rather than writing on a larger blank piece of paper; it’s a little less daunting for them.

We talked about how these words were adjectives and how we might use them in our poems.

D wrote a poem about a fast monkey and E wrote her about a train journey. H decided to join in by drawing a fast picture!

I really enjoyed using the book in this way and I plan to use poetry again next week for our creative writing time. I think it’s such a  useful skill to have, and playing with language is always fun and I never fail to be amazed at the things the children manage to come up with.

If you enjoy poetry then you might enjoy Joseph Coelho’s Year of Nature Poems or any of the poetry books that I wrote about here. We also try to do a regular poetry tea time which works well with children of all ages – who doesn’t love tea and cake?

What other poetry books can you recommend for both adults and children? Please leave me a comment or come and chat on twitter.