Year 6 – National Poetry Day

Project Overview

On the 7th October this year, we celebrated National Poetry Day. This is a day where poetry is a focus around the whole country and is shared. In Year 6, we spent the whole week looking at a variety of poetry in Reading lessons and practising how to perform them. As a taster, we decided to look at archaic poems, comedy poems, nonsense poems and modern poems, each with different messages. To also reflect Black History Month, we also chose poems that reflected this through some poetry by Maya Angelou and John Agard. The poems we looked at were:

  • The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
  • Macavity by T.S. Eliot
  • Stealing by Carol Ann Duffy
  • Half-caste by John Agard
  • Six O’clock News by Tom Leonard
  • Caged Bird by Maya Angelou
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Overall we had a fanatstic week and the children really learnt a lot about the background of these poems, the poets themselves and how to read them aloud, memorise them and perform them. We are incredibly proud of how well they took part and they all really engaged with poetry in a fantastic way!

What The Student Says

“I loved performing Macavity to the class! I want to go see CATS now.” – 6NP child

“I liked looking at John Aagard’s poem and the Six O’clock news poem as it made me think about culture, race and accents in a different way.” – 6LJ child

“I really enjoyed performing to the class and learning the poetry off by heart. I really like poetry now!” – 6MB child

“I didn’t think I was going to like poetry at first to be honest, but those poems were pretty cool.” – 6MB child

What skills were developed?

The children have:

  • developed their communication and language skills
  • learnt about a variety of different types of poems from archaic poetry, nonsense poetry, comedy poetry and modern poetry
  • learnt about voice, volume, pitch and inflection and how to utilise it to perform a poem
  • performed a poem

What The Teacher Says

I have really enjoyed looking at poetry with Year 6 this year and they really engaged with the poems. Poetry tends to be something that is looked at quickly and we don’t tend to perform them, which I think takes a lot of the magic away. I love poetry and this year we looked at some of my favourite poems and it was brilliant to see the children really get engaged and love the poetry as well! Since National Poetry Day, I’ve had a lot more children come up to me about poetry they have found and they are loving sharing them with me and the class! 

-Miss Benson, Class Teacher