Grasshoppers on Blog: First Day at School, Poetry on a Theme

We have been back at school for two days, and my class have settled in really well to the routines. I was hoping they would, having agreed or asked to take them on into year 4 for a second consecutive year.

Last year I began my year with them exploring poetry, and this year have also taken this approach. A way to get them into the swing of things and playing with words. Our starting point is creating images. Developing the use of adjectives and figurative language, through the use of familiar frames and language games.

Our first pair of sessions, has involved innovating on a short poem called Butterfly Hatching, borrowed from this DFES document. We read the poem, and worked in small groups to act it out, exploring the differences between words that described action (verbs) and those that described the appearance of the creature. Taking the idea of the butterfly emerging, we developed this to think about the idea of us arriving at school, and in the classroom.
What would the door look like?
How would we/ did we feel when we arrived in school today?
How might the way we feel effect the way the door appeared or how we opened it?

We worked in groups to role play and act out the different ways we might approach or enter the classroom, according to our feelings. Together we drafted 3 opening lines for the poem based on the structure of Butterfly Hatching, thinking about and catching wow words as we went.

The modelled starter looked like this:

Back To School

The cracked blue door clicks open
I skip happily in
Bouncing and excited.

The students then worked in pairs to draft their own starters. After a readaround, this is where we ended yesterday's session. Today we moved to the ICT suite, to complete and refine our poems, reviewing and refining before thinking about the actions that were to follow and how we would end our first day, thinking about how it had turned out for us. The completed outcomes were published to our new class blog this morning and there are still more to come. If you have time please pop by, visit, and perhaps leave a comment. Our poetry can be found on our blog by following this link. As the unit evolves we will also begin podcasting again, inorder to engage and develop performance aspects of some of the poetry we intend to create. Look forwadr to hearing from you.

Heritage Explorer via Kwout

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Heritage Explorer: Home

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Thanks to Steve from Wiltshire LA, for this "Nugget." A collection of interactivities, teacher's notes, web and IWB resources, based around historical images. A swift play myself, and I found some great starting points for talk and guided investigational work; using images as both primary and secondary sources. Our History theme this term is on the Victorians, and there is a host of material to support this. Using images as secondary sources, there are also materials on the Tudors, castles, the Romans and other common themes, and subthemes. A site to come back to and definitely one to share with colleagues.