A guest post from our author Jim Edmiston.

Today is National Poetry Day, so try to fit in some time to relax into the language.  I’m going to suggest some easy ways to help your children to write their own poetry. But first: is this a conundrum you face?

The statutory requirements of the National Curriculum require children to be given access to different styles of poetry: to read it, learn it by heart, perform it and to write it.  Not being part of our national tests, however, means it can be squeezed out of the teaching week. Creativity is not something we can easily measure, but we usually recognise it when we see it.

I think teaching poetry should involve more than introducing children to the works of others, though, of course, that is a necessary first step.  There are so many wonderful examples to choose from. Writing poetry, however, is an opportunity not to be missed. It can be a challenge but experiencing success can be thrilling.

The immediacy and brevity of poetry appeals to children (as well as adults).  It’s not a hard slog. At the outset, writing it, at least to achieve early, unpolished results is not beyond reach.

It’s fun, it’s engaging, it’s manageable, it expands vocabulary.  It gives the child the chance to be in charge of the language, rather than be dominated by it.  This last point, I feel, is very important. Why? Above all, it involves playing with words and phrases; and so gives the child a chance to feel what it is like to be in control of the language.  

This doesn’t mean setting aside the rules of grammar (even nonsense poems have a recognisable structure). But it does mean considering alternatives, changing the order of words while retaining the sense of a line.   Fixing it. Shaping it. Improving it. Finding an appropriate rhyme that makes sense in the context of the subject matter is a success in itself.

Rhythm can be a little more elusive, though it is accessible through hand-clapping, with connections to counting beats as you might in a music lesson.  Changes in vocabulary and word sequence will need to be explored in a line of poetry in order to drop stressed and unstressed syllables into the right places.  It’s like a puzzle, a game of Tetris. To this end, a poem has to be said out loud to hear whether it works rhythmically or not.

I’m also an illustrator.  I have boxes and books of drawings, library resources, good drawings, bad drawings, half-finished drawings, scribbled ideas for compositions, clippings from magazines, etc.  To get an imagined idea out of my head, I have to put a lot of stuff into my head in the first place. The same has to be done with any form of creative writing – prose and poetry.  Any writer you talk to or read about will have notebooks close to hand, scribbles on scraps of paper round the house, shed or office, ideas squirrelled away under the bed or on their mobiles, and pages of disconnected paragraphs or character lists, figures of speech on their laptops all waiting to be shaped and to find a home.

Every word has a lot of work to do in a poem in order to create a picture the reader can see. You might say that poetry is one of the more pictorial/visual of literary forms, so the analogy with illustration is not so far-fetched.  As a result, the early stages of a poem can be seen as architectural. The construction process is likely to be messy and visible, as if it were made of recycled pallets, rusty nails, spilt glue. Or imagine a landfill site full of broken toys from the back door of the toyshop, stage jewellery, discarded pantomime scenery, the odds and ends from your grandmother’s kitchen drawer, things the charity shop couldn’t sell, useless stuff Grandad has been hoarding in his shed for years.

Modelling this gathering process is necessary to avoid your young writer sitting on their hands and staring into space.  

Once a topic has been decided, the class can go through the alphabet finding appropriate rhymes for poems about such things as:

Disastrous DIY –  self / shelf, chair / dare / stair / stare,  break it / make it, good / should / wood

Clumsy superhero –  cries / disguise / eyes / flies / skies,  chase / place / pace / trace, brave / cave / save / wave

Adverbial and adjective phrases are a great resource for exploring rhythm.  Clapping the stressed syllables allows children to hear and physically feel the beats in phrases such as:  over the garden wall.

Demonstrate how it can be manipulated to arrive at the right number of beats in each line: over the high garden wall   AND   over the highest garden wall.

Here is an example of a galloping rhythm that suits the subject of the verse:

           This is the horse that couldn’t wait

           To see the world, so jumped the gate,

           Swam the river and climbed the hill.

           With so much to see, it’s galloping still.

This is entry level poetry.  I think of completing a rhyming couplet as an easy way in.  It’s like a ‘rhyming cupful’: a taster, offering quick success.  Again, in preparing children to write a second line, I would collect suggestions for rhymes first.  Here are the first lines of some rhyming couplets describing a funny family. Help the class to see that there are four beats in each line.

                    Standing on stilts, my brother, Bradley,

                    ……………………………………………

                    My cousin, Sam, is a terrible child

                    ……………………………………………

                    My friend Aisha’s as tall as a tree

                    ……………………………………………

Once running with it, children are quite likely to ask to compose both first and second lines themselves.  Taking another step, here are some descriptive similes, begging to be extended into verses:

Angry as a badger,                             Dressed like Batman,                             Sweet as a sunbeam                             Crazy like a hare                             Soaring like a bird                             Stinky as a fish

……………………………                             ……………………………                             ……………………………..                             …………………………..                             …………………………..                             .…………………………….

Here is a starter verse for a poem about what a store might sell.  Notice that the first three lines rhyme. The fourth line should rhyme with the fourth line of the verse that follows.  Again, gather ideas from the whole class first. This is basically a list poem, so anything goes. For example, the store might also sell: jammy crumpets, witches’ hats, parrots and guinea pigs, golden saxophones, skinny jeans, talking fridges, left-handed teacups and so on and so on.

                     jelly beans and pick-and-mix

                    double-handed hockey sticks

                    playing cards and magic tricks

                    in the We Sell Everything store

Writing poetry, and creative writing generally, shouldn’t be limited to World Poetry Day.  Children should be shown how to engage with their language and enjoy it. I also think there is a strong argument in favour of the benefits of playing with the language.  It’s a great way to learn about its structures and how to manipulate those in order to create an impact. So, good luck and have fun.

                    Sheep are not athletic,

                    They’re never energetic,

                    But if they were magnetic,

                    You could stick one on the fridge.

Jim Edmiston is author of our Children as Writers series, as well as our bestselling Reading Comprehension series for reading success in years 1-6.

To celebrate National Poetry Day we are giving away two free poems (for year 2 and 6) from the Reading Comprehension series.

Download your free poems now.