Pupils across the school celebrated National Poetry Day (held on the first Thursday of October) by exploring poetry in their English lessons. Some classes read poems and others were able to write their own poems.
The theme for 2024’s National Poetry Day was Counting. Counting can have several meanings, (from Oxford Languages):
- determine the total number of (a collection of items).
- take into account; include
- be significant.
In lessons we discussed the range of meanings counting could have, and pupils came up with ideas of things/people we count, including and in no particular order: money, friends, religion, family, blocks, ourselves, education, video games, football, taekwondo, travel.
Pupils in Phase 4 Red and Purple explored a collection of ‘counting’ themed poems. We chose two particular styles to use for our work.
One was using percentages (%) to show what counted in our lives if our lives was made out of 100%. Pupils had a range of responses in what counted and how much they counted in their lives. Pupils even created pie charts to illustrate these ratios.
The second poem structure we used followed the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The simplest is the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. In this format, pupils considered the sounds (syllables) in a line. Line 1 had 1 sound, Line 2 had 1 sound, Line 3 and 2 sounds, Line 4 had 3 sounds and so forth.
In this, the pupils chose one theme regarding ‘to count’ to focus on their Fibonacci sequence poem. This was challenging to consider what word(s) to use in each line. Pupils had to be creative!
Please enjoy the sample of work from our pupils.
