Poetry Cafe

Last week saw Wandsworth Prep host our annual poetry extravaganza. Mr Alastair's classroom was transformed into a dark, atmospheric Jazz café - the perfect place for the children to virtually perform their poems to parents. The day got off to a flying start with a welcome by last week’s poetry expert Tom Roberts (https://bit.ly/34NdfeN).

The aim of the cafe is not only to improve literacy and creativity, but also encourage all the children in the school to embrace the power of the spoken word. Proof that poetry is not only for children, we also asked our parents to turn poets and were impressed with their rhymes and verses.

If you want to continue the poetry theme at home click here for some recommendations. https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/poems/poems/

Poetry round up by year group

Reception

Reception's vision was what they wanted to be when they are older. We discussed this during circle time and as a class wrote a poem called 'When I grow up I would like to be...' Each child stood up confidently and said their lines of what they wanted to be. A chef, footballer, ballerina, Rapunzel and a doctor were some of their aspirations! The children performed with confidence and had some wonderful poems from our parents too.

Year One

In Year One we discussed vision and they talked about vision as being ‘what we see’. We then read poems about different characters and talked about how we ‘see’ those people. We finally chose the poem Mum by Laura Ranger (7 years) as our poem to recite to parents. The children then wrote their own poems about their parents, inspired by this.

Year Two

In Year Two the children recited a poem from the book ‘The Great Green Forest’ which is a vision of the reality of the rainforests today . We had a rainforest mouse who complains about all the noises of the animals and he can’t sleep. Then the logging machines come and start destroying the rainforest. He then realises that he misses all the animals that made their noises in the forest. It focused on rhyme and repetition. For the individual poems the children wanted to write something positive about rainforests. They focused on a fictional vision of the animals that lived there. They had to write an amazing truth about the animals and then extravagant lies, such as an anaconda who plays football.

Year Three

Our class poem - written collaboratively by Year 3 called ‘when we grow up...’ is all about our vision for the future of our world.

Individual poems were all about who we are, what we aspire to be based on ‘I am’ poem structure - our vision for ourselves.

Year Four

The theme for national poetry day this year was VISION and we had a great time with this. The group poem performed by Year 4 was one called Who Knows by Liz Brownlee; it’s about night vision - what the owl sees when it’s out hunting. The children then performed their own poems. These individual poems were inspired by our work on the theme Explorers. In Year 4, we’ve been looking at Shackleton’s incredible expedition to the Antarctic on board the ship Endurance. We used this as our springboard and thought about ‘Vision’ in terms of an explorer. What do they see when they are exploring different habitats in different parts of the world. Who knows what the explorer sees?

Year 5

The Year 5 children started by performing the poem we’ve been studying in class: Clouds by Brian Moss. We had fun analysing all the faces and objects this poet was able to see in the clouds with a little imagination. Then the children performed their own poems based on the theme Vision. Some, like Brian Moss, were inspired by the endless possibilities of things that can be seen in the shapes of clouds; other children were creative with what they can see when looking up at the constellations of stars and others chose to interpret the theme of Vision in another way.

Year 6

The children in Year 6 started by performing their group poem See through my Eyes by Karl Nova in which he talks about how he sees the world and what the word ‘Vision’ means to him. The children then performed their individual poems that they had written in class. This gave them the opportunity to express what ‘Vision’ means to them, what they see through their eyes and how they see the world. I was so impressed with how creative, how individual, how personal they were.