National Poetry Day 2023 teaching ideas
A collection of engaging and unusual teaching ideas to help you to celebrate National Poetry Day in 2023 with your KS3-5 students.
Taking this year's theme of refuge as the starting point, poet Trevor Millum shares his creative ideas to encourage students' own poetry writing experiments.
Including conceptual ideas, examples and prompts, students explore the idea of refuge and what this means as a starting point for their own work. They also consider how different forms and structures might work as a way to express their ideas about this topic.
A sample extract from this resource:
Explore ideas around shelter and refuge with KS3 students
Pupils will probably be familiar with the places where people took refuge during World War 2: Anderson shelters, Morrison shelters and the Underground stations. You might share some pictures of these. In Ukraine, people are sheltering in a similar way.
This is an exercise in empathy and imagination, the idea being to imagine you are in a shelter of some kind and looking at the others around you. Here is a starter which could be used, or pupils could generate and share some images before getting down to writing poems of their own.
We sought refuge in the bunker
In the shelter underground
There was granny with her knitting
The needles made a clicking sound
By her, granddad with his pipe
And in the corner…….
Huddled …..
…… was crying …..
All were listening for / hoping that / sheltering from ……..
