HALLOWEEN RHYME SESSIONS

 

for Juniors

online!

 

ALSO FIREWORKS POETRY SESSIONS for KS1 + KS2.
See my supporting video: https://youtu.be/My4QvlCEOIw

 

Mind-firing, skills-stretching, confidence-building, fun!

To book: please email katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com

 

 

PLUS – Halloween and Fireworks writing and colouring sheets here: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/katewilliams_poetry –
popular with teachers!

Twitter @Katypoet

 

 

Wonder is a wonderful book, engaging for people of all ages – and not just poetry-lovers, but anyone with curiosity about our natural world. I’m delighted to be contributing in a tiny way with my ‘Butterfly’ haiku, along with a wide and exciting range of poets, present and previous.

 

I’m loving dipping in and browsing, picking up mind-stretching facts, ideas and images and completely forgetting the time.

 

Apologies to Twitter followers for repeating the news, but this post is actually for my website blog – it just happens to get redirected to Twitter as well, automatically.

 

The collection was chosen by Ana Sampson, on behalf of the Natural History Museum, and is published by Macmillan. Out now!

Kate

 

 

 

 

 

 

HARVEST POETRY-WRITING

 

As your fruit ripens and your crops mature, gather words and rhythms to celebrate your harvest. Show your class the beauties of sweet, juicy fruits, and help them appreciate the annual miracle of food grown out of the ground. Inspire them to capture the wonder of your local yield in writing. They’ll love framing their poem in a fruit shape or decorating the page with golden wheat sheafs and climbing beans, perhaps.

 

CELEBRATE WITH ALL SENSES

 

Before writing, provide some real harvest produce to hold and inspect close up.  Encourage your children to consider them with all their senses. What do they smell, taste and feel like? How do they feel in your hand? Prompt for interesting words like scent, fragrance, aroma, flavour, sugary, luscious, smooth, glossy, silky, bulging, heavy, weighty, wobbly, intricate, symmetrical. Then, of course, there are the colours to consider – crimson, luminous green, yellow as the sun…

 

POEM STARTER IDEAS

 

Give your class a starter line, such as:

‘I love…’
‘I am [a harvest item]’
‘What am I? I have…’
‘From a ____ tree I fell’
‘As orange as _____ , as golden as_____’
Or go for cinquains.

 

CINQUAIN EXAMPLE

 

These 5-line poems draw the writer’s attention to different poetic techniques, line by line, so they’re great for all-round skill-building. They also provide a simple format to follow. There are variations, so I’d suggest checking out a few examples if in doubt – not that you have to stick to any rules. It’s creative writing fun, not an exam!

Here’s an example I made up this morning, sitting by my apple tree in the late summer sun:

 

APPLE CINQUAIN 

Ripe, rosy, round
Dangling, dropping, rolling
Fragrant as the fresh-mown grass
Snack on a stem
Marvel

 

Kate Williams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INDEPENDENT WRITING

You may have a different starter line in mind, so go for it! Mature and confident writers will probably prefer to think up their own, so do encourage individual approaches and developments too.

 

 

HEALTHY EATING LINK

 

Make the most of this focus on food sources to help children appreciate wholesome, natural food, such as fresh fruits and vegetables. Talk about the vitamins, minerals, fibre and all-round goodness they offer.

 

Click here for fruit and healthy-eating poetry resources (you can browse without buying!) 

 

POETRY WORKSHOPS available to book now, for September onwards! See Workshops page.

 

Kate
Email: katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com 

 

Excited to be contributing a haiku to a fabulous new collection, ‘Wonder’, by the National History Museum, to be published on September 2nd.

 

Preview on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wonder-Natural-History-Museum-Poetry/dp/1529058996

 

Also looking forward to reading the other poems in this fascinating and celebratory nature-fest.

 

A great resource for schools and families, and a source of pleasure for any nature-lover and/or poetry-lover of any age.

 

This book will also be a stark reminder of our need to save all this natural, served-on-a-plate, wonderful treasure!

 

My tiny contribution wonders at butterflies.

 

 

 

Kate

BIRDS bring our skies alive, and our parks and gardens, too. They set forests buzzing and rooftops twitching, and even keep us entertained in busy cities.

 

 

There’s so much to say about birds, your young writers may need a starting point or feature to focus on, such as movement, shape, characters of different kinds, or the habits of one.

 

 

 

Then there’s the background to colour in – the sky, trees, lake or whatever. After all, you might be looking at anything from penguins to swans to sparrows to albatrosses – like the one at the top.

 

 

Photo: found on a path near my home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But a poem needs to be succinct. It’s not a story or a factual description, but a little, float-alone scrap of magic in its own right. Take a HAIKU, for instance – how could your class sum up their thoughts on birds in 17 syllables?? Here are some free bird haiku tips, ideas and starter frames to help:

 

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/birds-in-flight-haiku-frames-12338856

 

 

 

 

POEM TYPE

You might prefer something different, style-wise, and you’ll find some other ideas, including handy vocabulary suggestions to prompt for, if you scroll down from the link above. I’m afraid that’s the only freebie in the birds bunch, as they take time to think up and produce, but I keep prices as low as possible. Other freebies available on other themes.

 

 

WARM-UP TIP

 

Remember to be birds together, on feet, away from desks, preferably outside, before writing starts. This way you can instantly start drawing out ideas, firing imagination and stretching active language.

Movement will also get the circulation going, giving brains a boost and burning off fidgets. Oh yes, and being a bird is fun!! At any age.

 

 

My published shape poem, ‘Albatross’, is available to download here.  Illustration above by Gabriel Evans.  

 

 

Photo: Duck family enjoying our village floods.                                                                                                                                             

 

Birds in flight poetry workshops also available. 

Kate                                                   

Email: katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com
Twitter @Katypoet                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

WOODS can be dark and creepy or colourful and glistening. Their tracks can be squelchy with mud or velvet-smooth with fallen leaves. You might see tiny birds high in the treetops and a shy rabbit peeping round a tree trunk, or you might see nothing but a veil of mist, twigs poking out like witches’ fingertips. But what can you hear? Was that just the rustle of the breeze, or…

 

CHILDREN’S EXPERIENCES – Most children have stepped into a wood or tree-framed park, and have enough experience to think up something to say on the theme, and with a class stroll around your nearest leafy corner, they’ll soon get their ideas flowing.

 

 

POETRY PLAN – Decide what form of wood poetry you want to build with the children – descriptive, narrative, list, recipe, image-rich, haiku, kenning or freestyle, say? Prepare a guiding format, with an example, to present after your warm-up.

 

 

WARM-UP – Have a wander around some trees together, then show some woodland pictures and discuss related experiences. Ask what trees are like (shapes, colours, movements, what they remind you of, how they change through the year…). Now stand up together and be trees – all sorts from weeping willows to spooky, wizened, Halloween trees, to splendid, tall beech or oak trees. Invite descriptive words and action language as you go.

 

WRITING STAGE – Now present your prepared format and read the example poem.

Here are two example poems:

The first is descriptive (£1.50 download via TES),

The second – for advanced writers – is in metaphors (Free download via TES):

KICK-START – Concoct an opening line together, writing it on the board… and a second one.

 

OFF THEY GO! Now hand out your sheets and let children have a go with their own ideas.

 

NOTE about RHYME: unless rhyme is your focus, leave it out. Your writers will be freer without it, though if an apt rhyme happens to come to mind – fine.

 

FINISH – Share and celebrate outcomes.

 

RESOURCES – See my TES catalogue for woodland poetry-writing resources (please click for link)

 

 

 

 

 

 

WOODLAND WORKSHOPS available in the autumn. See Workshops page.

 

Kate 
Email: katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com
Twitter: @Katypoet

Autumn leaves offer wonderful poetry-writing inspiration for children of all ages.

 

There’s so much to say about them, what with their colours, textures, shapes, movements, free flight, fragility, and symbol of seasonal change!

 

What’s more, leaf-writing offers a great excuse to get outside and moving. Help the children spin and launch their leaves. Encourage the children to sniff and describe their delicate, fruity fragrance, and ask them what their leaf feels like against their cheek.

Prompt for movement words, as well as describing ones, for a broader language stretch. Do the leaves just fly, or do they dart, skip and backflip through the cool, autumn sky?

And there’s more fun to be had! When the poem’s finished, it can be written out in colours in a leaf shape, and hung up to flutter and gleam. Or maybe you have other ideas? The possibilities are wide open!

 

I encourage all sorts of poetry developments in my workshops, with exciting outcomes.

 

Here’s a preview of a simple starter format, with example words and similes, plus warm-up suggestions, available at TES (£2), in case handy (click to view).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More leaf poetry resources in my TES collection (click for link).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kate

Email: katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com
Twitter: @Katypoet
Poetry workshops also available

Hello schools! 

Looking forward to stepping back into the classroom next month, with my usual poetry workshop offerings! 

I work with Nursery – Yr 6, helping to bring language alive for children with multi-faceted warm-ups before supported poetry-writing. Everyone has a chance to share lines from their work, and we round off with funny rhymes or another light activity, if time. 

Ukulele features in Nursery and KS1 sessions, with songs and action rhymes, as well as acting out. 

Topics:

AUTUMN LEAVES, WOODLAND ANIMALS, OLYMPICS, SPACE, DRAGONS, FIREWORKS.

Please email or DM on Twitter for more details, including price for your area (v. competitive!). I cover London, S. Wales and most areas in between + Birmingham and Manchester.

happy hard-earned hols!

Kate
katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com
Twitter: @Katypoet

As the Olympics start in Japan, I’m delighted to be contributing… er, not to that, exactly, but to Brian Moses’s mini online Olympics poetry anthology:

 

http://brian-moses.blogspot.com

 

Leap, spin and sail through this entertaining collection, contributed by some of the UK’s top children’s poets! Perhaps they’ll inspire you to write your own Olympics poems, too! No one’s too young or old to have a go! Take an idea from the poems on show, maybe, and spin it at your own unique angle.

 

Here’s mine again, by the way: Wrong Jump (scroll down to view). As a one-time long jumper for my school, I’m glad to say I never did high jump by mistake. However, I did do other less than impressive things, like travelling across England with the team to compete against a posh and distant school, only to do 3 no-jumps (missing the starting mark). That was it: challenge over. Then came the great, grand tea, laid on by the great, grand school, as a reward for our ‘achievements’. Oh well, live and learn. Anyway, the cake was good.

 

Wrong Jump

 

I ran, leapt, swung up high,
over the heads of passers-by,
over the traffic, the lampposts, the wires,
the rooftops, chimneys, towers and spires,
the House of Lords, of Commons, Big Ben,
the top of the London Eye, and then – 

down I tumbled, bump-bump-bump,
to the gloomy boom of the judge: “No jump!”

“But why?” I cried. “I jumped to the sky!”
“Wrong jump,” he sighed. “This is long, not high.”

Kate Williams 
(Published in When Granny Won Olympic Gold, A & C Black)

PS: What do you reckon hedgehogs make of the Olympics?
Hedgehog Olympics – Payhip

 

Classroom Poetry next term – Covid rules permitting!

Nursery – Yr 6.
Interactive, fun, adventurous! 
Inclusive of all abilities and confidence levels.
Topics to choose from:
Space, Autumn Leaves, Dragons, Woodland Creatures, Fireworks.

Please see my Workshops page for more information.

 

 

 

Price per day varies depending on distance from home, overnight costs and any other factors. Please email me to check: katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com .