This year we held our first in school celebrations for National Poetry Day in the library! Poetry reading has many benefits for students, including the fact that poems are shorter to read than novels. This year we wanted to highlight the benefits of poetry to students and decided to do this by having some enjoyable events in the library.
At Highlands we have been increasingly interested in poetry since last year. A poetry club was set up by one of our teaching assistants who is also a poet. This helped us to identify students in the school who were already keen poets.
We had lots of poetry collections but they were buried on the library shelves and often got forgotten. We moved them to a more prominent position where students can find them easily and bought new collections too.
In our library lessons last summer we worked on our own poems for the Foyle’s Poetry contest. The Poetry Society provided us with booklets of last year's winning poems and we used these as inspiration for our own. We decided that the best entries submitted would win an in-school workshop with a real life poet on National Poetry Day 2015. Twenty four students were chosen.
The next step was finding a poet to come in and work with our students. We chose poet Laurie Bolger as I had seen her perform at a poetry event and knew that her modern poems and lively performance style would challenge preconceptions that students have about what poetry is. Laurie told our students about what working as a poet is like and how she has been able to develop a career using her creative talents.
Laurie held a creative workshop for our Foyle’s poets where she helped them develop their ideas.
Students used unusual pictures and quotes to stimulate their own writing.
She also worked with our Year 9 classes using things they had lost as writing prompts and played Haiku Bingo with Year 7.
Her entertaining, down to earth style and her vibrant poems such as Carrot, Mash and Bill Bailey.
There was a great reaction from students and we finished off the day with Laurie speaking at a Year 8 assembly. Her visit reinforced the message that poetry can be cool and that you can create moving poems out of your every day experiences.
The next day, inspired by Laurie Bolger’s performance we organised our first Open Mic Poetry event in the library at lunchtime. We organised a performance space and teachers and students took turns taking the mic and reading out poems. We performed our own work and poems about cats as well as poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Yeats , Shelly, Poe and Byron. Students brought in their lunches and we all had fun taking turns reciting poems. I was amazed at how well students read their poems. We will definitely repeat this event next term!
Our teachers performing poems.
For more poetry info have a look at the following links:
