Poetry Live!, an event which is aimed at GCSE English students, is taking place at Brighton Dome tomorrow (22nd November 2019) with performances by John Agard, Simon Armitage, Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Grace Nichols, Imtiaz Dharker and Daljit Nagra. The event aims to inspire students and foster a love of poetry aswell as assisting them with their GCSE studies.
There are some great resources online for poems being read out loud or performed. For primary school teachers The Children’s Poetry Archive which is part of The Poetry Archive contains recordings of poems, many of which are read by the poets themselves. There are also interviews with poets including Allan Ahlberg, Brian Moses, Philip Gross and James Berry. It is possible to explore poems that fall under a certain theme, poems that are suitable for a specific age group or by using terms from a glossary e.g. Alliteration, Simile, Dialect, Haiku…
For secondary school teachers, EMC created a web-based video channel called The Poetry Station in 2009. (The Poetry Station App can be downloaded on an iPhone or an iPad.) The resource contains videos of poems being read or performed and includes works by Maya Angelou, Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney, Kate Tempest, Benjamin Zephaniah, Gillian Clarke and many more.
If any of your pupils want to enter a poetry recitation competition, Poetry By Heart is currently open for primary school pupils aged 7-11(KS2) and secondary school pupils aged 11-16+ (KS3, KS4, KS5). The national phase of the competition will take place in March 2020. For more details visit the website http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/
Finally, if you are looking for a newly published picture book story which celebrates poetry, take a look at Poetree written by Shauna LaVoy Reynolds and illustrated by Shahrzad Maydani. In this story a young girl writes a poem and attaches it to a tree. When she returns the next day, she finds that her poem is no longer there and a new poem is hanging from the tree. She is convinced that the tree has written her a poem. But has it really? You’ll have to read it to find out. The story also includes instructions on how to write a Haiku and would be ideal for introducing a poetry writing exercise.
