National Poetry Day
The theme of National Poetry Day this year has been play, and a perfect example of this has been the activity that happened in Kingfisher class. The class listened to this poem from Greg Bottrill about September fun:
Bonnie and Eppie walking down the lane
Met a tiny spider sitting in the rain
They invited it to come for tea and a biscuit too
And all went home together and they've invited you!
Ginger snaps and cookies put them on a plate
Stack them in a pile for everyone to take
Shortbread at the bottom, pink wafers at the top
Gobble, gobble, crunch, crunch, we don't think we can stop!
Can you pass the milk to us and the sugar please?
Can you pass the milk to us and the sugar please?
And spider can you spin a web to go upon our knees?
We'll use it to catch the crumbs to keep them off the floor
So you can take them home with you and munch on them some more!
Students then drew the pictures that came into their minds and that had been inspired by the poem. Some of our Kingfishers then wrote lovely, playful poems where they played with the words that had come into their minds when they heard the poem.
These are two of the poems from Kingfisher:
The funniest pattern in the world
Egg on the table
Splat on the floor
Cheese on my knees
Diamonds on my nose
Water on my foot
Caterpillar on my nose
Sparkly cookie
Crumble Crumble
Avery 5 Kingfisher
Avery 5 Kingfisher
Come and have a slurp of tea with me
Put toast and jelly on my toes
Slurp in my mouth
Yummy jelly in my toes
Slurp with Eeyore
Josephine 5 Kingfisher
Josephine 5 Kingfisher
During the library lessons, students have been creating black out poetry, and in classes they have been exploring all the different reasons that poetry is important for us. During the morning we held an assembly to celebrate poetry, at which we heard a wonderful variety of poems from Mr Turnbull-Jones reading one of his favourite poets, Benjamin Zephaniah, to classes performing action packed poetry, to individual students who had asked to share their favourites, including a 700 year old Persian poem. One student, Lili Dunn, had written her own poem for the occasion, and both staff and students were impressed by her reflections about play.
play
when i was little
play was everything
running behind the ice cream van,
heart racing, lungs singing.
making deals with the sky,
like if i touched the lamppost in time,
i would never die.
i built kingdoms out of carpet squares,
told secrets to friends
who weren’t really there.
and somehow
they listened better than most do now.
sometimes i’d sing
into hairbrush microphones,
lyrics made up,
whole concerts at home.
off-key, too loud,
but i didn’t care,
joy was a song
floating free in the air.
then i grew up.
kind of.
and play got replaced
with deadlines, disgrace,
the word future
thrown like a grenade in my face.
i miss the days when bliss
was more than 5 minutes outside,
when scraped knees healed quick,
and the chance of tomorrow was wide.
sometimes i wonder
did i lose those friends in my head?
did they vanish, or
did i trade them for worry instead?
but the truth is:
the little girl
who chased the van,
who sang to the sky,
who played till the streetlights won
she’s not gone.
buried maybe,
under jobs, exams,
all the weight of becoming.
but she’s drumming, humming,
still there, becoming.
and she reminds me
that play isn’t something i outgrow,
it’s stitched in my bones,
it’s part of my soul.
and a piece of me
i’ll always know.
We always love National Poetry Day, and this year we were impressed by the writing that our own students produced. It really was a celebration of playful words!
