‘Thoughts’ Rather Than ‘Poems’…
12th September 2024Read moreI’ve done a book called Pebbles (Smokestack Books). It’s made up of what we can call ‘thoughts’ rather than ‘poems’.
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Long Thin Poem
26th February 2024Read moreIf you change the shape of how you write, it can change the way you think and it can change the effect that the poem has on the way you read it and the way that other people read it. One way to do this, is to try writing something with one word per line.
Don’t Drown
24th October 2023Read moreYou could say that this is a poem about being in water. That’s what it looks like. But what if we said that it’s not a poem about being in water. What would you say it’s about then? Whatever you think of that’s different from being in water, but still fits the words, will be OK. It also means that you’re saying that the words of the poem ‘stand in’ for other words...
What Would You Say to a Bumble Bee?
5th June 2023Read moreWhat would you say to a bumble bee, or any bee? Or a wasp? Or an ant? Or a worm? Have you ever been stung by a wasp? You could imagine yourself back to that moment, and you could write a little poem of what you want to say to that wasp just after it’s stung you! You can make it rhyme if you like, just as I did in this little poem...
Family Secrets – a Poetry Idea
7th March 2023Read moreIn every family there are secrets. Sometimes these secrets are connected to a photo, or a picture or a thing that is kept in a cupboard or a box...
Ian McMillan’s ‘Strolls’
30th August 2022Read moreEvery day, the poet Ian McMillan does a tweet of what he sees on his ‘strolls’. This is the one from August 29 2022...
Poem by my Cat
21st February 2022Read moreThe idea behind this poem is that a pet has thoughts about the person looking after it. Our cat loves sitting on our laps. So I thought about how the cat might think of what it feels like when I get up...
A ‘Listening-Thinking’ Poem
1st November 2021Read moreThis is what I could call a ‘listening-thinking poem’. The first part is about what I can hear (or not hear). The second part is about what I ‘wonder’...
Sweet Sleep
14th July 2021Read moreThis is from Many Different Kinds of Love. If you want to write poems you could take this poem and do one, some, all or any of these things...
Poem Idea
13th April 2021Read moreYou’re in school assembly…what’s going on? Perhaps a teacher is speaking…what are they saying?…perhaps some children are doing ‘Show and tell’…what are they showing?…but what are you thinking? Are you thinking about what you did last night? Or what you might do tomorrow? Or at the weekend? Now, back in assembly: what’s going on? Are you all going to sing something? What? And what are you thinking about that?...
Poetry Idea
6th January 2021Read moreHere’s a poem I wrote that is a mix of what I see in hospital when I go in for check-ups and a daydream about it. Poems can be like this: partly real, partly dream...
True or False Teaching Idea
17th September 2020Read moreThe last few videos we've put up on our YouTube Channel are called 'True or False'. You could take each of these, play them to the children and ask them which is it, true or false? Get them talking about how do we know if something is true or false?...
Stand Together
30th January 2020Read moreEach year Holocaust Memorial Day has a theme. This year it’s ‘Stand together’. I work closely with schools in Cambridge doing poetry, song, drama and documentary, doing a variety of story-telling, poetry performance, getting the children writing and performing too...
What Do You Need For a Story?
8th December 2019Read moreFor most stories, you need a place, you need a time, you need a main character. Your main character needs to have some kind of problem or issue, or dilemma, or needs to solve something or find something out - this can come from the character or it can be because something happens early on...
Workshop Ideas
28th June 2019Read moreFirst up, one of my students was looking into what kinds of ‘games’ could teachers play with pupils when it comes to books? I put that up as a question on Facebook, and here are the answers: Then, a teacher said on twitter that she was having difficulty getting her students to be interested in writing so I posted up the following tweets...
Collected Ideas for Poetry With Year 1
3rd June 2019Read moreFor the writing blog this month, I’ve collected together a set of tweets that I put up on twitter for a teacher who asked for help in doing poetry with Year 1. Here are my replies...
Over My Toes
30th April 2019Read moreBefore you read this poem to the children, talk with them about how wherever we are there are sounds. Get them in pairs talking about some sounds they have heard in different places. Remind them to think about holiday places as well as neighbourhood places, indoors and outdoors...
What I Saw
20th March 2019Read moreThis is a poem about going out and looking. Some of it is really, really what I saw and one or two bits are things that I’ve invented. That’s OK! I was trying to create a scene...
Poetry to Commemorate the Holocaust
14th January 2019Read moreOn Sunday January 27 it’s Holocaust Memorial Day. I will be in Cambridge at a ceremony to commemorate those who died in the Holocaust but also to remember those in more recent genocides...
The Child Who Was Wild
31st October 2018Read moreYou can ask the children to talk to each other about anything that comes to mind, anything that they think... You can suggest that they might have some questions to ask about the woman, the woods, the child, the city, the flowers. You can do this by asking, what would you like to ask the woman? the child? Who would like to try and answer those questions?...
Poems & Emotions
29th September 2018Read moreWe’re used to thinking of one kind of poem being about feelings and emotions - love, sadness, mourning, hope and so on. Think of one of the most famous poems in English, the one by Wordsworth that begins, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud...’ Straightaway there in the first line is an emotion-feeling word: ‘lonely’...
Volcano Bag
31st August 2018Read moreI was listening to the radio and I heard about a woman who lived on the island of Monserrat in the Caribbean. Monserrat is a really one big volcano and a few years ago it erupted and people had to run away from the island. A few years later people started going back to the island. They didn't want to leave their homes forever. The interview asked one woman who had gone back if she was worried about the volcano exploding. She said, no she wasn't because she had her volcano bag...
How to Shake Things Up in the Writing, Reading, Talking, Listening Field
30th July 2018Read moreFor teachers wondering about how to shake things up in the writing, reading, talking, listening field...
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