Last week I visited Y5 and 6 students at Kings School. I especially loved the way the very lovely librarian made a display of my books and a poem with my name running down the middle –an inventive form of an acrostic poem. How creative! What a warm welcome!
In our session we played with lines, I read poems and we made up poems together.
The exciting cricket semi-final between New Zealand and South Africa had been on the night before so we finished up by hunting for lines that might go in ‘An Ode to Cricket.’ This is what we came up with. I thought it would be fun to play with the lines and do a second draft which I have posted after our first draft.
Ode to Cricket
Pitching the hard ball
the bat swings
the bat whips the ball
the bat sweeps the ball
explodes blasts flashes
the ball out of the park,
lifting over
cries and cheers from the crowd,
ear-splitting screeches.
The bowler sweats with pressure
pitching the ball hard.
After that I did three workshops on the sorts of things I do when I am building up to a poem. We hunted for words and we hunted for lines. I heard some terrific lines from each of the groups. One class used this starting point to come up with their completed storm poems. Their teacher sent me two of her favourites. I really loved the way the students rolled up their sleeves and got stuck into writing poems with imaginations searching and vocabularies soaring. It was a great visit! Thank you.
The Storm
Thrashing rain
Devastating crashes
Wind whipping trees
Dogs howling for mercy
Thunder smashes lightning
Crackles endlessly
Triumphant trees stripped
Through the rages the sun still shines
By Denis Y5
The rain is gushing away
Old newspapers rustling in the sky
No cars to be seen
Leaves running into the sunset
The wind fading up to the gods
By Matthew Y5
Poetry Box 