Your holidays through poetry

Are you a reluctant writer? Or do you love the power of words?
Here is a starter to help you write more expressively about your holidays... And as a bonus, you need less words too ;-)

New Zealand has several famous writers and poets. James K. Baxter is one of them. He writes thus:


"The town was usual enough; it had
A creek, a bridge, a beach, a sky
Over it, and even a small tin church
I never went to. My brother, my cousins and I
Did what boys do - dozed in the hot
Schoolroom, made bows and arrows, dodged the mad
Boatbuilder, crept like rabbits through the black
Under-runners with a weak torch,
Burnt dry rushes, wrestled or swam
Doing nothing important"

- James K. Baxter


Re-write the poem, filling in your own details, using strong verbs, interesting nouns, and appealing adjectives, yet maintaining the same rhythm. Post it on your own blog or as a comment here.

Poetry competition

Today we learnt about Haiku.
How many syllables.
How many lines?
What are they usually about?
From which culture do they originate?

Here is an example Snowy and Savvy wrote in class after school. It's really brilliant...
;-)

Roses are red-ish
Violets are blue-ish
but who really cares?

Okay - so this isn't a very good example. Perhaps yr 7's can't write good poetry.
Can you prove me wrong?

Narratives and Room5

SO, you've just spent a whole term writing a wicked narrative based on your adventures on Kakepuku - now we've discovered Mr Woody might actually like poetry - so, can you help him to learn about the famous poets and the most renowned narrative poems?

Inchcape rock is one such poem - one group of expert reader Room5ians has begun to learn about literature circles - they may help guide us through the tricky task of unravelling some of the English speaking world's greatest writing....

http://www.schoollink.org/csd/pages/engl/narrativ.html lesson plans for narrative poems

[for mr woody and teachers - kids may look too]

what wikipedia says:

"Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story.

Narrative poetry is among the oldest, and perhaps the oldest, genre of poetry. Many scholars of Homer, from Quintus Smyrnaeus forward, have concluded that his tales of the Iliad and Odyssey were composed from compilations of shorter narrative poems that related individual episodes, and which were more suitable for an evening's entertainment."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_poetry

http://www.lancsngfl.ac.uk/curriculum/literacy/lit_site/html/fiction/narrative/index.htm

the link above has some of the famous narrative poems in it - one of them was read at my wedding to my darling beloved Sasha :-)

can you guess which one?

the following link has a lesson for us to do in class [or at home]

http://www.babinlearn.com/pdf%20files/Poetry/Narrative%20Poetry.pdf

have fun, young bards - you are the best!