Poetry week

Date: 3rd Oct 2022 @ 2:34pm

Poetry week 2022

This week is National Poetry Week; the theme is 'Environment'. In Year 6, we have shown a particular interest in, and talent for, poetry. 

When starting Year 6, we completed a poem based on Roger McGough's 'The Writer of This Poem'. These are currently on display on the staircase leading to our classroom. 

This week, we learned more about the conventions of poetry, including its form and features. We learned about the different types of poetry, including prose poetry, haikus and limericks. We talked about the rhyme scheme of poems, monosyllabic and polysyllabic words and how they affect the rhythm of poems, as well as some of the tricks poets use to make their poems interesting to read (including assonance, consonance, hyperbole, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc).  

Once we had looked at a wide range of poetry conventions, we looked at the poem 'Going, going' by Phillip Larkin. This poem was about our natural environment and how it is being overtaken by concrete and man-made structures. Our task was to find as many of the poetry conventions within this poem as we could. We found that the poem contained stanzas called sestets (made up of 6 lines), repetition, metaphors, a rhyming scheme of ABCABC and many more. 

We then completed our own Kennings about the environment. Here are a couple of examples:

Ice-cream melter

Skin burner

Plant grower

Leaf drier

Summer symboliser

'Sun' by Molly

Forest wanderer

Amazon ruler

Meat devourer

Death maker

'Jaguar' by Sophia

Shark dodger

Ice waddler

Wing shaker

'Penguin' by Joseph

Here are some haikus that some children came up with on the spot...

When Halloween comes

The dead will rise up to us

Sweets will be eaten

- Max

When kids rule the world

Children will be powerful

Kids will be the best

- Adelaide