Contributor:
Claire C
I was teaching a class just recently and had to take a poetry lesson. In my opinion, you have to keep the children active throughout the class, so I decided to do the poem by Roger McGough called The Sound Collector.
It was amazing for them because I got each group to take a verse and practice it. There are so many sound words in this poem the children could really dramatise the poem. I then got the entire class to recite their parts of the poem. It worked so well.
As an extension activity, I got the children to make up their own sound collector poems on subjects such as the beach or the farm or school.
They had great fun doing this. This was by far one of the best English lessons I have taught to date!
A visitor has suggested the following variation… You can also change the theme so that children write a poem called ‘The Taste Collector’. I have seen a teacher do this. She brought in some different foods and asked for volunteers to be blindfolded and describe the taste of an unknown food. It worked really well, and you can scaffold the poem for lower-ability children.
A visitor has shared the following experiences using this idea… We taught a lesson to this poem, but we broke into groups and walked around the school to collect our own sounds. We then came back to the classroom, and each group contributed a verse to a whole class poem. It worked really well, and the poem became more personal to the children.
Elsis also commented:
We did our own version of this too, called ‘The Sense Collector’ and went on a sense trail around the school. We were the Sense Collectors. It was fab!