KS1 Poetry Club: Growing a Poem

These are notes on a Key Stage One poetry club session I ran; this is not a lesson plan. The ideas here are meant for enjoyment, fun, and sparking an early interest in poetry. Feel free to use any of the ideas and activities.

Resources:

A4 card or paper to stick flowers onto

Pre-cut colourful paper petals, circles for centres, leaves

Glue sticks

Green pens/pencils/crayons/string (for stalks)

Pencils

Suitable poetry books for sharing/browsing/ideas

(A real flower)

(A real plant pot)

• We started with an action poem, on our feet, to get in the poetry mood!

• I showed the children a real rose. I took it around so each child could smell it, and said we would be making a poetry flower today.

• We talked about what we need to 'grow a poem'. Children put their ideas (verbally) into a large (real) plant pot. I had a bank of words to help prompt if needed. In the pot they put words including:

rhyme pattern words paper pen laptop ideas imagination beat actions sounds

• I showed the children my poetry flower (pictured above), and read it like this:

garden flower

spring flower

pretty flower

bright flower

waving flower

dancing flower

picked flower

my flower

and explained that they would be making their own. We shared different words to describe flowers, and I had a large sheet of paper full of ideas for them to look at, throughout.

• Children wrote their own flower words on pre-cut petals, arranged them into a flower shape, around a centre on which they wrote 'flower'. They drew on a stalk and added a leaf or leaves, on which they wrote their names.

• Some children chose to make a second flower when they had finished, some looked at poetry books I had brought along. I suggested that they could use the flower idea to make a poem describing something else, so one child made a flower with the word Mummy in the centre, surrounded by petals saying love, great, smiley etc.

• We finished by listening to/looking at the poems that children wanted to share.