Don’t Drown
24th October 2023Read moreDon’t Drown Here’s a poem: Don’t drown. Practise swimming for a long, long time. Don’t drown. Practise shouting, ‘Help!’ Don’t drown. Keep the water out. Don’t drown. Call for help. Don’t drown. If you see the water rising, leave. Don’t drown. If you think you’re sinking, grab something. Don’t drown. If you think there’s no way out, you’re probably wrong ...read more
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What Would You Say to a Bumble Bee?
5th June 2023Read moreWhat Would You Say to a Bumble Bee? Hey old Bumblebee! No need to bumble about. You know the way you came in? That’s the way to go out. What 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 ...read more
Family Secrets – a Poetry Idea
7th March 2023Read moreFamily Secrets – a Poetry Idea In 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. In my family, my father’s cousin Ted kept some photos of our relatives who had been killed in the Holocaust. He kept them in this ...read more
Ian McMillan’s ‘Strolls’
30th August 2022Read moreIan McMillan’s ‘Strolls’ Every day, the poet Ian McMillan does a tweet of what he sees on his ‘strolls’. This is the one from August 29 2022: Early stroll. Summer is loosening its hold. The mating call of a passing motorbike. A flower grows through a crack in the pavement. A police car paints the street blue. Silent choirs of ...read more
Poem by my Cat
21st February 2022Read morePoem by my Cat Michael is OK but the trouble with Michael is that when he stands up he doesn’t have a lap. The 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 ...read more
A ‘Listening-Thinking’ Poem
1st November 2021Read moreA ‘Listening-Thinking’ Poem Here’s a new poem I wrote: The house is silent. It’s early. I hear myself breathe. The house is silent. But something shifts. A slight creak. More silence. Then another. I remember yesterday. We found two or three large spiders. Someone explained that September is the spider season. How do they know? I wondered. Do they talk ...read more
Sweet Sleep
14th July 2021Read moreSweet Sleep Sweet sleep I need you, I know, Sweet sleep I know I need you when my face feels the pillow Sweet sleep you wash away the wants and wishes Sweet sleep you are the place I need to go Sweet sleep This is from Many Different Kinds of Love. If you want to write poems you could take ...read more
Poem Idea
13th April 2021Read morePoem Idea You’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 ...read more
Poetry Idea
6th January 2021Read morePoetry Idea Here’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. There’s a lonely corridor. I’m lonely in the corridor. The lonely corridor connects with other corridors. These are corridors that I once ...read more
True or False Teaching Idea
17th September 2020Read moreTrue or False Teaching Idea The 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? Then move into asking the ...read more
Stand Together
30th January 2020Read moreStand Together Each 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. This is all under the auspices of Professor Helen Weinstein and HistoryWorks. This year they asked me to ...read more
What Do You Need For a Story?
8th December 2019Read moreWhat Do You Need For a Story? For 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 ...read more
Workshop Ideas
28th June 2019Read moreWorkshop Ideas First 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 ...read more
Collected Ideas for Poetry With Year 1
3rd June 2019Read moreCollected Ideas for Poetry With Year 1 For 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: Get as many poetry books into your classroom as possible. Encourage the children in pairs to browse, ...read more
Over My Toes
30th April 2019Read moreOver My Toes Over my toes goes the soft sea wash see the sea wash the soft sand slip see the sea slip the soft sand slide see the sea slide the soft sand slap see the sea slap the soft sand wash over my toes. Before you read this poem to the children, talk with them about how wherever ...read more
What I Saw
20th March 2019Read moreWhat I Saw I’ll tell you what I did in town I saw a greengrocer in the underground with his pockets full of oranges a paperboy yawned so you could see his tonsils; there was one old football boot, lying in City Square and round the ‘Island’ came the man outside the Odeon with blue hair riding on a moped ...read more
Poetry to Commemorate the Holocaust
14th January 2019Read morePoetry to Commemorate the Holocaust On 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. Over the last 10 years I’ve discovered how it was that my father’s uncles who were living in France were killed in ...read more
My Mum and the Flower
23rd November 2018Read moreMy Mum and the Flower Here’s a new poem I’ve written: My Mum and the Flower My dad said that my mum had some secrets. ‘One time’, he said, ‘when she was a girl at school they said that it was ‘Harvest Festival’ and all the children had to bring in flowers. ‘Well, remember,’ said my dad, ‘your mother’s family ...read more
The Child Who Was Wild
31st October 2018Read moreThe Child Who Was Wild Once there was a woman, a young, young woman She ran from the city, the old, old city She ran to the woods, the deep dark woods She wasn’t seen for days. Days, weeks and months. She came out of the woods, the deep dark woods She came with a child, a child who was ...read more
Poems & Emotions
29th September 2018Read morePoems & Emotions We’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’. Another tradition ...read more
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 ...read more
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: How about a whole school writing project? I’ve seen these work really well in several schools. So, the staff get together and choose a ‘big’ or ‘important’ text or a single author. You each work out how you can work with some part of ...read more
Writing – Starting Points
11th June 2018Read moreThe simplest, easiest and most painless way to write is to be stimulated or inspired by another piece of writing. Writers do this, without self-consciousness or shame! We read something and it triggers something off in our minds. What kinds of ‘something’ might this be? And how do we allow ourselves to be triggered by other people’s writing? In one ...read more
Reveal-Conceal and Other Ideas For the Classroom
15th May 2018Read moreTeachers sometimes ask me for ways they can use to get away from the rigid questioning of children about books, or passages taken from books. I’ll share here methods that I’ve heard other teachers talking about. If you know about these already, apologies. 1/. Prequels and Sequels – any poem, passage or whole book ‘invites’ the making up of stories ...read more
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