Shape Poems

I looked on Google for examples of shape poems for KS1 aged children and put together a sheet of examples (download here).

We read through the sheet together and talked about what they liked/disliked, which was their favourite and why, what kinds of layouts did they have and what they thought made something a shape poem. Did it have to rhyme? Did it have to fill the picture or make a picture? Did it have to be full sentences or just words? Did all the writing have to be the same size? etc. etc.! Then I stuck it to the wall as a reminder.

Continuing with our plants theme, I decided we'd do a shape poem about flowers.

On the whiteboard, we discussed the kinds of things we might talk about in our poems. Then we talked about how we might write those ideas into the shape of a flower.

I gave them a faded template of a flower for them to use (in the above download file). Z really wanted to join in so I sat with her as she wanted to know how to spell words, so the twins ended up working independently. I originally planned to sit with them and do more thesaurus work, but it didn't work out that way! And they weren't inclined to plan first, they just wanted to write straight onto the flower. 😏

When they were done, we mounted these onto coloured paper and put them on display next to their acrostics. 😄😄

Blue: F, Green: M, Orange: Z

The twins enjoyed turning the paper to write their words in a way which fit in the petals and in the centre!

Z's poem says: "orange, red, pink" "poppy" "beautiful" "smell fresh and nice" "flower" "roses" "make me happy when they grow"

I asked them if they wanted to do their own shape poem about anything, drawing the picture themselves, but they said no. 😆 They'd had enough of them. 😂😂

Acrostic Poetry

We haven't done any poetry for a while! So I checked online for a list of suggested genres and picked a few for us to look at over the next few weeks inshaAllah: acrostics, shape poems and couplets.

We started by visiting the library and looking for poetry books - not in any particular genre - just for general inspiration.

Fortunately, there were some examples of acrostics in one of the books we took out!

We read the examples together and I asked the girls what they thought an acrostic poem was... They said it has a word going vertically which is what the poem is about. 👍 Then I quickly made this up on the whiteboard to demonstrate!

As our current science topic is to do with plants, I thought it'd be nice to link our poetry to this. We talked together and wrote the following two examples:

Then I challenged the girls to write their own using a plant-related word as their theme. We talked about how poetry doesn't have to rhyme! And the meaning of what they want to say is more important. 😁 When they were finished, we used thesauruses to make their writing more interesting. Finally, they wrote their poems out in their best handwriting, illustrated them, then trimmed and mounted them onto coloured paper.

Papa was late coming home that evening, so we left this final acrostic on the whiteboard for him... The girls eagerly asked him if he saw it the next morning, but unfortunately he was too tired to notice. 😂

Dictionary Work & Nonsense Poems

This week, we focused on nonsense words in poetry.

We read a few examples (e.g. On The Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan) and the whole of the book Noisy Poems from the library - their favourite inside being one about spaghetti (Spaghetti Spaghetti by Jack Prelutsky) so we decided to use it as inspiration for their own nonsense words poem.

I asked them which food they loved which they wanted to write about and they both agreed on cake - specifically the cake they had on their 5th birthday! So I put up a picture of the cake and asked them to describe it, making notes on the whiteboard as a spider diagram as they went, prompting them with the idea of the five senses for description as well as how it made them feel.

Once they had a lot of ideas down, we tried writing the first verse together - what kind of rhythm did they want? Did they want their poem to rhyme? Which lines? We came up with:

You look so yummy,
I can't wait to eat you,
You're beautiful, colourful and

And? So they needed a word to rhyme with "yummy"... so let's make one up! Any word which ends in an "ummy" sound! And they went with "numummy".

In this way, crossing off ideas from the spider diagram as we went, we worked together to turn their ideas into a poem with nonsense words.

When the verses were all done and we read it through, I asked them if it was clear their poem was about cake... To which they said no! So what could we write so the reader knows they're talking about cake? And so we ended up with the couplet at the start and end of the poem.

Now the poem was complete on the whiteboard, I typed it up into Word so they could take turns on the laptop editing it to make it more personal. Then I printed it out for them to illustrate.

Our next few Literacy lessons were spent looking at dictionaries: what are they used for? (meanings of words) How are they organised? (alphabetically) How do you use them? (look up the word you don't know) What information do they have inside? (also the kind of word, e.g. noun, adjective, etc.)

Then, I gave them a template so they could make a mini dictionary for the nonsense words in their cake poem. First, they highlighted all the nonsense words in their poem and wrote their words alphabetically down the page on the template. Then they wrote what kind of word it was (they were all adjectives!). Finally, they wrote what their nonsense word meant, referring back to their poem to help them.

You can download our dictionary template here.

Poetry: Rhythm, Rhyme & Thesauruses

We haven't done any formal work on poetry yet - only exposure from nursery rhymes, songs, or whatever happens to come up in books! So we spent the last few weeks immersing ourselves in poetry books and trying to write our own poems.

We began by visiting the library and taking out a load of poetry anthologies. Alhamdulillah our local library had a good selection so no need to buy any to get what I wanted! One book which stood out though was compiled by Julia Donaldson. The girls recognised her name straightaway as she's been a popular author in this house for a while! And it contained a good mix of both modern and classic poetry. We were also recently gifted this beautiful, nature-themed hardback anthology, which not only feels like a luxury to look through, but also contains the perfect mixture of modern and simple enough poems the toddler can understand to more complex and classic poetry to stretch the twins. I also went through the workbooks I have and found some good comprehension sheets based on poems for the girls to do 1-2 each week.

The girls are already very familiar with the concept of rhyming so I didn't want to dwell on that aspect too much. I did make sure to point out any cases where the poem didn't rhyme though to highlight the fact not all poetry has to be rhyming! So for the first week we just did lots of reading - together and individually - and discussion: about what they thought of the poem, likes and dislikes, the rhythm and structure, what the poem meant or its purpose, etc. We came up with the definition together: poetry is just playing with words.

The second week, we focused on rhythm and repeating lines/patterns in poetry, highlighting examples from the books and also doing this particular comprehension:

Afterwards, we used it as a basis for their own poem about shoes. We discussed it together first, both thinking about shoes (what do shoes do? What different ways can you move in your shoes? They took it in turns, one moving around on the floor and the other writing a verb to describe it on the whiteboard, eg spinning, jumping, kicking, etc to create a long list) and about the structure of the poem (which part repeats? What effect does it have? Which lines need to rhyme? How long should our poem be?) then I sat with them individually to help them write their own (Where is your poem set? Which shoes would be suitable? What are you doing there? How are the shoes moving? Look at the list on the whiteboard to help!). I also prompted them with a variety of rhyming words to choose from when they wanted it (let's go through the alphabet to see what rhymes, or almost rhymes. Which word makes most sense?) and this is what they came up with:

When they were done, I showed them how to search for pictures on Google and they chose a couple to illustrate their work.

The next week I wanted to concentrate on expanding their vocabulary, so introduced the idea of synonyms and using a thesaurus. First, I reminded them that poems don't always need to rhyme, then found an example of a riddle to use as a scaffold. Next, I modelled with them how to write the beginning to a poem about animals, which gives a clue to what the animal is on each line. We tipped out some toy animals onto the floor to help give them a visual and they chose to use a camel as the example. So I asked them to look at the toy and describe what a camel is like (think about what it looks like, what it does, where it lives...), did the same for an ostrich, and together we came up with the two verses:

I have two bumpy humps,
I'm brown and yellow,
I live in the sandy desert,
I like to spit out runny spit,
I'm a camel!

I like to put my head in the ground,
I become scared when an animal comes,
I'm big with a long neck,
I live in Africa,
I'm an ostrich!

I recapped editing with them, to check for mistakes and improve their work, and read through the verses asking them what they thought their reader was imagining after each line. Would it be more fun if we tried to trick the reader so they get a surprise? I used the second verse as the example by rearranging it:

I live in Africa, (could it be a lion? or an elephant?)
I'm big with a long neck, (no, it must be a giraffe!)
I become scared when an animal comes, (...I guess it could be a giraffe?)
I like to put my head in the ground, (wait, giraffes don't put their heads in the ground!)
I'm an ostrich! (ohhh! let me read the verse again - yes, that makes sense!)

The girls found this hilarious. 😂 So I asked them if they wanted to rearrange the camel verse too and they did. 😁

I typed up these two verses into Word, then helped the twins individually to come up with two more verses of their own for animals of their choice.

When they were done and it was time to edit, I explained the concept of a thesaurus to them. Sometimes, you might feel like the word you have is boring and you want to change it, but you can't think of a better one yourself... When that happens, you can look in a thesaurus - it lists words which are synonyms, i.e. words with similar meanings. I showed them how to use the built-in thesaurus in Word, then they went through their poems and used the thesaurus to make their poem more interesting.

Finally, I printed their work out so they could illustrate it.

When Papa came home that evening, they read their poems to him and asked him to guess what the animal was after each line. They were both pleased their tricks worked and he didn't guess correctly straightaway. 😂👍