I love poetry and think it’s a really fun way for children to learn about language and to play with language. A friend hosts a regular poetry tea time where the children share a poem based on a theme and I have decided to spend a little time each month looking at one poet in particular in more detail. Last month we looked at the work of Robert Burns and this month it was the term of a more contemporary poet, James Carter.
Materials & Resources
For this session, James kindly sent me some copies of his shape poems that I could share with the children attending. I also found some other poems that were available on James’ website.
I also had to hand a couple of James’ poetry books as well as the clips below to hand:
- Video of James reading Firework Poem
- Audio of Electric Guitar
I also had copies of some of James’ books:
- Journey to the Centre of my brain
- Weird, Wild & wonderful
- Zim Zam Zoom (I don’t have this one but it sounds great!)
How I Ran The Session
I started by talking a little about James Carter and why I like his poetry. We talked about how he is (very!) different to Robert Burns who we had looked at previously and we talked about how he uses a lot of descriptive language.
For the first activity, I asked the children to spend a minute or two thinking of some words that they would use to describe fireworks. They came up with some fantastic words and we talked about how these were words that were onomatopoeic. We then watched the video of James reading his Firework Poem and the children noted that James used a lot of the same words.
We then talked about how James Carter likes to write a lot of Shape poems and we took a look at some of these. First of all we looked at the Electric Guitar poem and then listened to the audio of James reading it.
I then wanted the children to look at two shape poems to compare and contrast them. I chose the Viking poems and Earthling! Do You Know What You Are? Both of these are poems in the shape of a person, but with some differences. Two children volunteered to read the poems aloud and we then talked about the similarities and differences between the poems.
The children did a really good job with this and it was interesting to listen to the things they were spotting. They really enjoyed the descriptive language used throughout the poems and the rhythm that the words generated.
The final stage of the session was to talk about the three rules that James shared with me for his shape poems and I left the children with a task of creating their own shape poem either with an original poem of their own writing or by using an existing poem and typing it into an appropriate shape.
To end the session the children took it in turns to read out some of James’ poems.
Following up with my own children
After the session, the older children chose a poem and attempted to type them up into an appropriate shape. They found this much more difficult than they anticipated! We also talked about some of the other poems and had a look through to see some other poems and the similarities between them and how the use of additional spaces and punctuation help to create the shapes. This was a really fun session and the children enjoyed looking at the poems and enjoying the shapes and looking at how the poems fit together.
You can read about our other poetry sessions at the links below:
