Reflections on articles and lesson plan for Blake poem

Reflections on articles and lesson plan for Blake poem

Reflecting on my own primary school experience, I don’t remember studying poetry specifically, but I can now appreciate the subtle ways in which it was incorporated into lessons.

I found the article ‘Hey Poetry’ very inspirational, especially the idea of learning poetry by heart and having fun with words. I liked the way the whole class was involved in the poetry lesson, from the teacher reading it aloud to the class and then building on that through reciting it and learning it by heart.

The articles have given me with a deeper sense of how important and relevant poetry is to everyday life from reading newspaper articles, to jingles on the radio and using it for self expression. There are lots of resources for teaching poetry to young children and poetry is more accessible to than I originally thought. The articles provide lots of different ideas for making poetry enjoyable and interactive and this is the key to making it more accessible to young learners. I also agree that the teacher must be confident and also show their enjoyment of poetry in order to teach it successfully.

I also found it interesting to read about the power of poetry different curriculum areas such as technology and science and appreciate the significance of using poetry to build upon literacy and social development skills.

Lesson Plan

I would teach ‘The School Boy’ to a year four class.
I would start by getting some of the children to read out the poem (at least twice) to get an overall feel of the poem. There would be some visual images on the interactive whiteboard to support the images in the poem such as the caged bird.
I would then ask them open ended questions about the poem and what they think it’s about. I would also try and pull out some of the techniques used such as the rhyming pattern and images used in the poem and also explain any words they didn’t understand.
Once the whole class had an understanding of the poem I would ask them about their own experience of school and whether they could think of any images that they would use to describe school and what it means to them.
I would then set the task of writing their own poetry about school using the ideas discussed or to write a modern interpretation of the poem.