October 1st sees the annual celebration of National Poetry Day. Had we not been living in a pandemic then it would have been an event I would have marked by having the children’s friends round to share their favourite poems.
We would then have had a go at writing a poem and then shared those. We would, have course enjoyed tea, cakes and scones!
I am a big fan of poetry and think it’s a fabulous tool. I’ve written before about some of my favourite poetry books but thought I’d share here the details of the recommended poetry books for 2020. For ease, you can find the suggested books for children and young adults in my Amazon store here.
Why Poetry?
I love poetry as it demonstrates so many different things. It can be serious or it can be fun. It can be a riddle or it can be a Haiku. It often uses language in fun and interesting ways, or presents serius subjects in an easily digestible form.
Poetry can be played with, it can be performed or read quietly. It can be anything you want it to be. Poetry has provided the children with a fun way to experiment with language in short sharp bursts and it’s been fascinating to watch them as they’ve crafted the things they’ve worked on.
National Poetry Day
The team at National Poetry Day have produced a range of resources and educational toolkit that can be used as part of your own celebration – they can be found here. We are going to have a go at writing a poem with the theme of ‘Vision’ using the resources from the fab James Carter. You can find the resources for this here.
You can find the full list of recommended reads here and I’ve pulled out my highlights below.
My Pick of This Year’s Books
I’ve been fortunate enough to have been sent a couple of the Natioal Poetry Day Books for children, and we have loved them. The images below show the recommended books for children and young adults and you can see all these in my Amazon storefront here.
From this list, I have seen most of these books. The Book of Not Entirley Useful Advice is Daniel’s favourite (and you can enter to win a copy on my Instagram here) We have a couple of these books that are referenced in this post here and I am keen to see the Lost Spells, and it may well be my Poetry Day Purchase treat as it looks and sounds fantastic. Poems Aloud is a fantastic book for learning about poetry and is a great one for performing.
The Young Adult selection below looks superb and I have my eye on a couple of these for myself. She will Soar is one I’m particularly interested in, as well as Run Rebel which sounds really interesting..
