Zoom Poetry Club!
Poetry for Children ~ at home
Many moons ago, I used to hold a Poetry Club in the bookshop for children aged 7 – 10 years old. While pondering how best I could help with ‘home-schooling’ my four grand-children, I realised that the obvious thing for me to do was to establish a way of reading and enjoying poetry in the virtual world – hence the Zoom Poetry Club! The first one was such fun to do that I thought I could offer it not just to my grand-children but to any who might like it – so jump in, and enjoy yourselves!
Just a tip, I encourage the children to have blank paper and crayons/felt tips etc on the table while we are ‘zooming’, and I invite them to doodle during any of the longer poems ~ this seems to help them to listen! Short poems I often read more than once. I don’t ask the children to analyse the poems in any way at all – these sessions are all about the fun and pleasure of listening to the rhymes and rhythms, the msuicality of the poems.
Poems we read
Time to Dust the Daffodils by Irene Rawnsley, from Haven’t You Grown! poems about families selected by Belinda Hollyer, Kingfisher.
There was an Old Man with a Beard by Edward Lear, from A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, Batsford
The Hollow Wood by Edward Thomas, from A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, Batsford
The Caterpillar by Christina Rossetti, from I Like this Poem, a Classic Anthology to Treasure edited by Kaye Webb
Spring, the sweet spring by Thomas Nashe
Spring Morning, from When we Were Very Young by A A Milne, Methuen.
Spring by E Nesbitt, from A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, Batsford
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad by Robert Browning, from The Dragon Book of Verse, edited by Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark
The cuckoo she’s a pretty bird (Folk Song) by Anon
Daffodowndilly from When We Were Very Young by AA Milne, Methuen
A Frisky Lamb by Christina Rossetti, from A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, Batsford
Woolly White Lambs, from Clinkerdump and other stories in rhyme by Wima Horsbrugh, Methuen 1954
Hilary (aka Grimble) still owns the very old copy of this book that you can see in the photos – it’s the blue one!
Fledgling from Bright Bursts of Colour – Poems by Matt Goodfellow, Bloomsbury
The Goat Paths, by James Stephens from The Dragon Book of Verse, edited by MIchael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark
The Brook by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, Batsford
I first learnt this poem from a book called Palgrave’s Golden Treasury which my Dad found when he was helping to thatch a roof – he found it in a loft, and the owner let him keep it!
Here are some of the activities that your children can do after the Zoom Poetry Club!
Here on the RSPB website is a video and all the details you need about how to make an origami daffodil. Perhaps you could make a few and have them on the table for Easter Sunday lunch! Do send me a photograph of your finished flowers!
Today’s Wordsearch is from a famous poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson called The Brook. Find the words, then see if you can write a different poem using some of the words you’ve found?
There are lots of fun things to do on the RSPB website. Here is all the information you need to make a recycled bird feeder – hope you get lots of birds visiting!
Don’t foget about all the poetry-related activities you can do, too! Here are a few ideas:
Write an acrostic poem using the word DAFFODILS to start you off
How about trying a Haiku? A traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count. Often focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression.
Stand in your garden (or open your window) and close your eyes. What can you hear? Listen for a minute, then write down all the sounds you heard and make them into your very own poem.
Find rhyming words for lambs, flowers, hills, sun, birds then make a poem using rhyming and non-rhyming words
Have fun!
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