Hazel Bennett

Teaching Children to Write Great Poetry: a Practical Guide for Getting Kids' Creative Juices Flowing Hazel Bennett

Every child should be able to enjoy the fun of reading and writing poetry. This inspirational book gets them going. `Teaching children to write great poetry´ is a gift of a book ? written by a teacher, with many successful years of teaching children to enjoy writing poetry, for teachers. It?s packed with great ideas to get creative juices flowing. Metaphors, similes, alliteration, rhymes and onomatopoeia ? they?re all there - proving there?s nothing like poetry for inspiring a love of literacy. The children learn to express their feelings towards the world around them. From the joyful daftness of nonsense poems and nursery rhymes to the challenge of narrative poems and cautionary tales, it smoothes the way, with lesson plans, support sheets and starbursts of creative ideas. Just watch their enthusiastic response to its well-structured fun. Acrostics, list poems, kennings, enjambment and shape poems are all included with suggestions of topics which start with the interest of the child. The children?s confidence will grow with their success, along with your own teaching skills, as they respond enthusiastically to the hilarity of limericks and clerihews, and grasp the skill of writing succinctly to create haikus and cinquains. Each chapter gives examples of the type of poem and a plan to guide pupils to recognize its characteristics and brainstorm ideas to create a class poem. This practice gives children the confidence to plan and create their own poetry. To empower your less able poets, there are carefully planned writing frames to encourage them to succeed. Poetry writing also brings about improvement in creative writing. The skills of choosing interesting vocabulary, creating their own similes and metaphors will spill over into their story writing. Children will learn to use their senses to enhance their descriptions and creating vivid pictures in the readers´ minds. As schools are returning to the cross-curricular approach to learning, there is scope to link up with others subjects. Watch the children´s enthusiasm for surfing the net to find the origins of nursery rhymes, creating imaginative haikus and cinquains for their own Christmas cards and miming the actions of their cautionary tales for their class assembly.