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Canterbury Festival Schools’ Poetry Competition 2016 1

Canterbury Festival Schools’ Poetry Competition

Teaching Resources for Primary Schools

This Year’s Theme

The theme of the 2016 Canterbury Festival Schools’ Poetry Competition is Picture This. Encourage

pupils to explore famous photos or paintings, images of places locally and globally, images of their

world and what’s important to them and everything in between through words and poetry.

This resource has been designed to be flexible – either to work through from start to finish, or to be

used on a more ad-hoc basis.

The following are just ideas and pupils shouldn’t feel like they have to follow a certain format: the

more imaginative, creative and original, the better!

Mary Ryan’s A Poet Paints Pictures With Words

You give me some paper and a new ink pen

And I’ll just let the words start to begin

But if it’s a picture from me you desire

To say it would be perfect would make me a liar

All of my lines just can’t seem to be straight

And as for staying in the lines, I’m really not great

Everything seems to go every which way

But ask me to write and I’ll know exactly what to say

The words I just sit and let them come

As easily as painting is to someone

A picture I can create with words few or much

And into someone’s life they often touch

Read Mary’s poem as a starting point to encourage them to think about the theme of the resource.

Exercise 1: Picture This – Building a Narrative Using a Character

Roald Dahl’s My Teacher Isn’t Half as Nice as Yours Seems To Be

1. Read the following Roald Dahl poem out loud. Then get the children to complete the tasks below.

'My teacher wasn't half as nice as yours seems to be.

His name was Mister Unsworth and he taught us history.

And when you didn't know a date he'd get you by the ear

And start to twist while you sat there quite paralysed with fear.

He'd twist and twist and twist your ear and twist it more and more.

Until at last the ear came off and landed on the floor.

Our class was full of one-eared boys. I'm certain there were eight.


Who'd had them twisted off because they didn't know a date.

So let us now praise teachers who today are all so fine

And yours in particular is totally divine.'

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2. A characteristic is a feature or quality belonging to a person e.g. big nose, long hair, friendly,

mean. This could be a physical description or something about their personality. Write down

five characteristics.

3. Then, write an acrostic poem with a few characteristics of a character. E.g. The BFG, Mr Stink,

The Mad Hatter, Matilda and many more. Our Mad Hatter example is below:

Manic meddling fingers

And big bright eyes

Dance around the room

Having tea with friends

Always wanting more

Tea! he declares

Tastes better with cake

Eaten every day

Remember to wash up!

4. Pick a character from books, games or films, and make a timeline/plot out a day in their life. For

example:

Peter Pan wakes up, and looks for his shadow

Then he has breakfast – anything he can imagine

It’s time after that for a swim with the mermaids

A whizz round Neverland to dry off

Throwing coconuts at Captain Hook never gets dull

As the sun sets, it’s time to go to the Darlings’

Careful not to wake Nana up!

5. Using this, write a poem about a day in their life. Include as much detail as you can, with lots of

adjectives (describing words) and verbs (action words).


Exercise 2: Picture This - Where in the world?

Read the below poems about different places.

Pie Corbett’s Space Staring

At night, I lean out of the window and sip cool darkness. Speckles of starlight freckle the night’s face. The moon casts bone-white light. A fox nudges a dustbin, hunting for scraps. Sleek cats sneak down back alleys – a lone car accelerates up the empty road. Late night city lights glare, glowering on street corners. I whisper a wish into the silence. A planet blinks its tiny red eye. The space above me yawns forever. Shop doorways settle down to sleep. Dawn is a cup of coffee away.

Mia Dixon’s My Hometown (Canterbury)

The City awakes,

The sun arises,

A new day dawns promising many surprises.

The cathedral bells sound seven, eight, nine,

This makes me grateful that the city’s mine.

The school bus arrives, alive and roaring,

Journeying to school on a Monday morning.

Rumbling and tumbling it slips past the river

Stour

Passing the City’s Westgate tower.

Evening begins, school ends,

I leave the playground waving bye to my

friends.

The car swiftly rolls through the town

Watching the glistening sun go down.

The City sleeps,

The moon arises,

Ready for another day full of surprises.

Mia’s poem comes from the 2013 Festival anthology from the theme My Hometown.

Task:

What happens in different places? How is a city different to the countryside, or to different countries? Choose a place from the pictures above, or choose somewhere from an image that you like of a place anywhere in the world. Children could use a spider diagram with one place in the centre, and their ideas about their chosen place around it or simply jot down ideas of what the place and the people there are like. Pick your favourite idea from this and use it to a write a short poem about what life in this place. What does it look and sound like? Do you understand what’s around you? What happens here?


Exercise 4: Picture This – Paintings as a starting point

These paintings showcase a variety of different styles, which can be used as inspiration for thinking about different styles of poetry. Not all of the above portraits are completely realistic, inviting the viewer to look at them differently.

Using one of these paintings as a starting point, write a short poem. For example, inspiration could come from the colours used; what the people in the painting are thinking about; where they are; what they are looking at.

Our example verse uses Picasso’s The Guitarist:

The man with the guitar Walks along to his own tune He plays in indigo, green and rainbow And sees the world bloom

Exercise 5: Poem in a Bag

Now, using the activity below, let’s create a poem painting a slightly more unusual picture. The kookier the better!

Lots of scraps of paper, and a bag to put them all in are needed

- Get pupils to list some items e.g. wooden spoon, door handle, lava lamp - Then list some creative places about where something comes from e.g. island, London, outer space, my imagination - Finally, list different weather types e.g, sunny, snowing, calm - Now put all the ideas into the bag – pupils then choose up to 3 scraps of paper from which they can start writing their own poem. For example, a pupil could pull sunny, island and wooden spoon, and would have to write a poem about using a wooden spoon to dig a cool spot away from the burning heat!

Exercise 6: Rhyming task

Not all poems need to rhyme, but this is a good way to write poems that are fun to read out loud.

Get the children to get their pencils and paper ready, and ask them to make a note on which words

they can hear that rhyme as you read the following poem out loud to them. Stress the words in bold

as these are words which rhyme. Included in this are half-rhymes too! You may decide that it is

easier to ask your class to put up their hands when they hear a rhyme instead of writing it down.


Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo

A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood. A fox saw the mouse, and the mouse looked good.

"Where are you going to, little brown mouse? Come and have lunch in my underground house."

"It's terribly kind of you, Fox, but no I'm going to have lunch with a gruffalo."

"A gruffalo? What's a gruffalo?" “A gruffalo! Why, didn't you know?

He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws, And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws."

"Where are you meeting him?" "Here, by these rocks, And his favourite food is roasted fox."

"Roasted fox! I'm off!" Fox said. "Goodbye, little mouse," and away he sped.

"Silly old Fox! Doesn't he know, There's no such thing as a gruffalo?"

Reveal the rhyming words.

Now write the following words on the whiteboard: sped, fox, kind.

Go through each word and ask the children to name words that rhyme with the original words, and

write responses under each of them.

Now, ask the children to write a poem using six of the rhyming words on the board. They can use

any of the words they like. Ask for volunteers to read out their poems.

Pupils can use the exercises in the lesson to create poems to submit for the competition, or if

they want to create their own original poems based on their own pictures, we’d love to read

those too! We look forward to receiving your entries!

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