Where to now?

Since the project has come to an end we've been thinking as a school how to sustain the impact cross the year groups. Alice spent her last two days working with Year five and six on mini poetry workshops so that other year groups could begin to think about using poetry beyond the confines of the curriculum.

One thing that came out of the final staff meeting discussion was that we don't want to follow the literacy framework with regard to poetry anymore because it limits how the children think about and create poetry. The traditional shape poem is one example that we have used in school before but it can become very frustrating because children stop thinking about the words they are choosing and become constrained by the shape they are trying to fill.
The project gave children the freedom to play with words and use their imagination in a way that more structured poetry writing cannot always do. We were not asking the children to write in a prescribed style or to have a set number of lines in their poem because we wanted them to be able to break the rules and follow their own ideas and imagination by looking at things around them from a new angle or perspective.

At first they found this difficult because the 'rules' hovered over them and stopped them from just writing down the idea that struck them. So a child would talk about all the wonderful ideas they had been thinking but then say that they didn't know what to write; almost as if the ideas and thinking had no connection to the actual writing process of the poem they were creating.
A beautiful phrase spoken verbally would end up being squeezed into a correctly punctuated sentence and lose all its natural rhythm and impact. Once the children could move beyond that stage they were able to write much more effectively but it did take a while for some to grasp that.