The Poetry Book

The Poetry Book is a practical guide to teaching poetry. When students write poetry, it enriches their language and vocabulary, encourages creative thinking and develops reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. All students benefit from writing poetry but ‘at risk’ and reluctant writers can experience particular success from the creative but scaffolded nature of poetry. The Poetry Book contains detailed information and fun activities that will encourage even the most poetry averse teacher to have a go!

Contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction — guiding principles and practices

Chapter 1 presents the guiding principles and practices for teaching poetry. The chapter begins by outlining the developmental stages of writing and the benefits of teaching poetry. Information on effective teaching strategies and catering for different learning needs is included. The chapter concludes with information about the knowledge and skills needed for poetry writing.

Chapter 2: Planning for poetry Read

Chapter 2 for information about planning for poetry in a literacy programme. Ideas for how to develop a poetry culture in the classroom are outlined and the importance of talk in a poetry lesson is emphasised. A range of useful resources for poetry and a comprehensive list of ideas for topics are included.

Chapter 3: Teaching the skills for writing poetry

Chapter 3 includes 36 mini-lessons to explicitly teach students the skills they need for poetry writing. Many of these skills transfer to other forms of writing. Subject knowledge for teachers is also included. Mini-lessons can be taught as part of the integrated poetry units in Chapter 5, before poetry Quick Writes, or to support the teaching of other writing forms such as narrative.

Chapter 4: Poetry Quick Writes

Poetry Quick Writes are short poetry lessons that focus on a particular poetry form. They can be used to add variety to a writing programme, as a one-off lesson or part of a more extended focus on poetry. Thirty-one Quick Write lesson plans and 36 exemplar poems are included in this chapter.

Chapter 5: Integrated poetry units

Chapter 5 includes five integrated poetry units that link shared reading lessons, mini-lessons and writing lessons. A set of high-impact teaching strategies is incorporated in all unit plans to scaffold success for all students including ‘at risk’ writers. The units include poem exemplars and other support material.

Chapter 6: Sharing and celebrating poetry

The final chapter emphasises the importance of sharing and celebrating poetry. It presents ideas for different groupings for students to respond to each other’s writing and includes a range of resources to support students to give effective feedback to each other, such as feedback frames and prompts. The last section of the chapter presents many engaging ideas for developing a love of poetry through performance, drama, art, publishing and music.

Resources

There are over 100 resources available to download, including: poem exemplars, poem frames, word lists, templates, lesson slide shows and feedback frames.