Session 1 · AUTHOR: Audience
Poetry café launch
- 10 minHook: read three very different short poems aloud (a funny one, a quiet one, a loud one). Which one would you choose for a five-year-old? For your nan? Why?
- 15 minMeet the brief: a poetry café for whānau and a junior class. List what those audiences enjoy, what might bore them and what would move them.
- 15 minPoem gallery walk: 12 poems on the walls. Put a coloured dot on one you like, one you don't understand yet, and one you'd perform.
- 10 minSet up writer's notebooks. Write your first 'noticing list' of ten sensory details from the classroom or window.
Session 2 · AUTHOR: Understand
What makes a poem a poem?
- 10 minCompare a paragraph about rain from a weather report with a short poem about rain. What does the poem do that the report does not?
- 20 minRead 'What makes a poem?' In pairs, find the line breaks, stanzas, images and sounds in two example poems.
- 15 minClass chart: things poems often do (compress, repeat, surprise, sound good aloud) and things they don't have to do (rhyme, be long, be serious).
- 5 minExit card: finish the sentence 'A poem is like…' in your own words.
Getting started
Start with poems that are short and funny; list poems and riddles are easy ways in.
Stretch
Find a poem that breaks one of the 'rules' on the class chart and explain why the poet did it.
Checkpoint
Everyone has a notebook with a noticing list and can name two ways a poem differs from a report.
Activities for this week
- Sound walk poem: What does our place sound like when we really listen?
Useful this week
- NZ Poetry Shelf ↗ New Zealand poems, interviews with poets and regular features for young readers and writers.
- Poetry ↗ The story of poetry in Aotearoa and the poets who shaped it.
- Poems for children ↗ A large collection of poems chosen for young readers from around the world.