Talbot Primary School

Year 6 completed a two-week poetry unit in the spring term. This included learning and performing poems off by heart (in guided reading) and drafting original, personification poems about a natural phenomenon (in writing). As the children are older, they were exposed to more challenging, classic poetry that stretched their thinking and understanding.

In week one, the children learnt the poem “The Tyger” by William Blake. This is a very beautiful poem, where Blake tries to understand why God would create creatures both as gentle as a lamb and others as deadly as a tiger. The poem contained many powerful images, like God as a blacksmith, and several changes in tone, which allowed the children to use their voices to evoke different moods. The children all learnt and performed the poem off by heart in groups, and some children even performed it solo.

In week two, the children learnt a very different poem called “The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. Here, Carroll plays with language, inventing his own words to describe the various creatures and environment where the Jabberwocky lives. The children quickly appreciated that, although dozens of words were made up, they were meaningful, and the reader was able to create impressions of what was described.

Please watch the recordings of some of the performances below.

Throughout both weeks, the children read “The Sea” by James Reeves. The poet compared the sea to a dog, rolling and tumbling on the beaches. They then imitated this style and wrote original poems, personifying different, natural phenomenon with people or animals. For example, comparing snow to a grumpy, old man, the stars to a group of giggling school children or a forest fire to a swiftly moving eagle. This was a new style of poetry for the children and built upon previous poetry units they had done further down school. IT was pleasing to see the level of thought that often went into selecting a single adjective or noun to create the precise image the children were looking for.