Poetry and stories for primary and lower secondary schools 4

How to break down into categories ways in which children respond to poems

(I posted this before as a matrix of response to all literature but I thought it would be useful to put here again.

I will post up as Poetry in Primary Schools 5, a set of 'trigger questions' produced by an English teacher and blogger, James Durran, in response to this matrix.)

For teachers: how to assess and analyse ways in which pupils respond to stories, poems and plays

This is a 'matrix' for use by teachers or anyone else wanting to do just this: analyse the kinds of talk and writing that pupils do in response to literature. It’s not intended to be a strict, fixed matrix; some of the categories overlap. Not all of the categories fit all situations. It’s intended to be both a work in progress and part of a process in which teachers and researchers adapt and refine what I've written as part of developing their own ideas in practice.







The matrix




When we make comments about literature (or when children or school students are in pairs or groups in a classroom) it's possible to evaluate those comments, notes or passages of writing.




One way to do this is to make transcripts of what they are saying.




These can be when they are in conversation with the teacher or with each other in pairs or groups.




The nature of the conversation will depend greatly on how it is set up: what kinds of questions the teachers set, or indeed if the questions originate from the students themselves.




This is worth experimenting with along the lines of what seems to be the most useful and fruitful way to set things up so that pupils do the most amount of engaged reflection.




When you look at a transcript of how the students talk, it's possible to categorise the comments. Here are some suggested categories:




1. Experiential - this where we relate what is in the text with something that has happened to me or to someone I know. One useful trigger question for this is simply: ‘Is there anything you’ve just read which reminds you of something that has happened to you, or someone you know? - Why?- How?’




2. Intertextual - this is where we relate what is in the text to another text. One useful trigger for this question is: ‘Is there anything you’ve just read which reminds you of something you’ve read, seen on TV, online, at the cinema, a song, a play, a show? - Why? How?’




3. Intratextual - this is where we relate one part of the text to another part. One useful trigger for this question arises out of a moment in a piece of literature where we ask: ‘But how do we know that, using something or anything that came before?’ (I have a nickname for this which younger children enjoy: I call it ‘harvesting’ - that is, collecting up information or feelings from other parts of the text.




4. Interrogative - where we ask questions of the text and voice puzzles and are tentative about something. One trigger question for this is, ‘Is there anything here we don’t understand or are puzzled by?’ This can be followed up by, ‘Is there anyone here who thinks they can answer that?’ And ‘Does anyone have any ideas about how we can go about finding an answer to that?’




5. Semantic - where we make comments about what something in the text means.




6. Structural - where we indicate we are making a comment about how a part or whole of the piece has been put together, 'constructed'. (One way we do this is by making comparisons across from one text to another noticing 'how' different authors do things.)




7. Selective analogising - where we make an analogy between one part of the text and something from anywhere else (e.g. as in 1, 2, 3). There will be an implied 'set' or 'series' being constructed here around a motif or theme or feeling. This process of analogising is extremely important even though it is often masked by seemingly trivial comments like, ‘I remember a time when I was sad...’ The importance lies in the fact that the pupil at this point is in fact creating an unstated abstraction. It is halfway (or more) towards abstract thought. Perhaps, it becomes fully abstract when the pupil(s) give that ‘set’ a name: eg ‘Sadness’ or ‘Emotions’ or some such.




8. Speculative - where we make speculations about what might happen, what could have happened. This is any kind of comment in the category of ‘I wonder...’ or ‘What if...’




9. Reflective - where we make interpretative statements often headed by 'I think...’ ie more committed than ‘speculative’.




10. Narratological - where we make comments about how the story has been told e.g. about narrators, methods of unfolding a story, what is held back, what is revealed. ('Narratology'). It may include an awareness of how stories have episodes, and sudden 'turns' or 'red herrings', flashbacks, flash forwards etc. Why dialogue is used, why e.g. indirect speech is used, why or how interior monologues are used. It can also be about why or how individual words, phrases, clauses, sentences and expressions are used. It might also look at narrative methods like e.g. looking at story openings and techniques, or how to create tension, how to create awe, horror, surprise and so on. This will overlap with 'effects'.




11. Evaluative - where we make value judgements about aspects of a text of the whole. These can be comments about significance, ‘what the author is getting at...’, or ‘why someone in the text said ‘x’’.




12.. Eureka moments - where we announce that we have suddenly 'got it'.




13. Effects - where we sense that an 'effect' has been created in us (or in others we have observed) because of the way something has been written. ‘This made me jump..’ ‘This made me sad...’ Response journals, or post-it notes on poem-posters and the like can ‘grab’ these very well. This can be at several levels: individual choice of words, expressions; how a paragraph or chapter develops; how characters interact; the outcome of events...etc.




14.. Storying - this is where we make a comment which is in essence another story. This is not trivial. As with ‘analogising’ (above) will almost certainly involve the making of a 'set' or a 'series' ie something has been selected from the original text in order to trigger off the new one. This is an implied generalisation. The academic Carol Fox points out that for very young children, storying has to carry a good deal of intellectual thought to do with e.g. understanding how the material world works ('cognition' of e.g. numbers, shape, scientific principles), how and why people think in certain ways ('philosophy', 'morality'), understanding and interpreting emotions (often reading this off expressions on people's faces in illustrations) and more.




15. Descriptive, - where we recount aspects of the text. This may well be more significant than it first appears because we can ask, why was this moment selected for the recount? Again, this may well be part of ‘analogising’ and/or ‘storying’.




16. Grammatical - where we draw attention to the structure of sentences - syntax, or how individual words are used grammatically.




17. Prosodic - where we draw attention to the sound of parts of the whole of a piece ie the 'music' of it. I have outlined in my book ‘What is Poetry? (Walker) how you can invite pupils to determine this themselves by using what I call ‘secret strings’ ie finding links between parts of poems whether linked by sound or by meaning.




18. . Effect of interactions: where we draw attention to how people interact ie how people (any character) treats another, how they 'relate' and what is the outcome of how they relate. In my experience, this is more valuable than simply trying to describe ‘character’.




19. Imaginative - where we move to another artistic medium in order to interpret what we have been reading or viewing....this may well involve more 'generalising' or 'abstract thought' than first appears because it involves 'selecting' something from the original text and creating some kind of 'set' or 'series' with it in creating something new. If pupils are asked 'why' this can be teased out.




20. Emotional flow: these are comments which show how feelings towards the protagonists change. Some people have invented 'flow maps' where you can draw up a kind of graph or chart, with the key moments in the plot along the bottom axis, and emotional states on the vertical axis...then you can label the line on the graph.




21. 'Author intention' - this might come partly under the category of 'speculative' - above - ie what the author could have written. Or it might be part of 'effect' ie how has the author created an effect. Word of warning: if this is separated from 'how it affected me' or 'how it affected someone else', this is of course speculation. The routine of a good deal of 'criticism' is to assume precisely the opposite ie because there is a certain literary feature - e.g. alliteration using a 'hard' sound, that it has a specific 'effect' - e.g. being insistent or heavy - and that the author intended these, which may or may not be the case.




22. Contextual - every piece of literature comes from a time and place. The person reading or spectating it will not be in exactly the same time and place. Many responses and critical ideas and thoughts go on because of this 'gap'. Students may well know or speculate about the gap, or the context ('They didn't used to do that sort of thing in those days') and of course, may ask questions and/or we offer them information or they are encouraged to research the context(s).




23. Representational or symbolic - where we make comments about what we think something 'represents'. This might be about 'character' where we say that a person 'represents' the class or type he or she comes from...'typical x kind of person'. It might be about parts of the landscape or the nature of the landscape - as it represents a particular kind of challenge to the protagonist. It could be a feature in the landscape/cityscape ie a particular kind of tree or building. It could be a single object that represents something more than itself - a torn piece of paper. And so on.




24. Extra-textual - comments that have apparently nothing to do with what's in the text and are about what's going on in the classroom or they are about pupils' interactions. Often these are as they seem to be but just occasionally they may well relate to how the pupils are interpreting e.g. a personal comment about 'You always say things like that...' may well be an indirect comment about this text and others.



25. Causation - it's been pointed out to me that I've overlooked the response where the reader/listener talks about people's motives or reactions or feelings as a result or consequence of something that happened earlier. The key words here that the reader/listener uses are of course things like 'because'  /'that's why he/she....'/'so he/she...' When young readers/listeners do this, it may well be significant because he/she will be grappling with the logic, chronology of the text, or of characters' behaviour. (The word the national curriculum uses here is 'inference'.)




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Note:
In terms of teaching, we may want to emphasise one, some or several of these responses. We may want to develop one, some or several. We may want to induce the students to ask 'why' about any or all of them so that we can advance their ability to reason and rationalise. We may want to compare any of these with how the teacher or critics have responded in order to take the comments and thinking to a new level.

Poetry and stories for primary and lower secondary schools 3

How to look at poems closely.

I'm imagining  SATs-free sessions in primary schools, where you can read, talk about and discover poetry without worrying too much about the exact questions that SATs ask. 

There are ways of doing close reading of poems which don't impose on the reading precise formulas. As you know these often go along the lines of proving that this or that poetic device ('alliteration' and the like)  is 'effective' before anyone's had a chance of deciding that it is! Another formula is the one where the child has to guess what was in the poet's head and state that as a reason why this or that poetic device is there: 'the poet introduced alliteration because it gives a sense of murmuring secrets' or some such. Again, no one knows this to be the case and anyway for another reader the alliteration in question may give another 'sense' altogether. 

Leaving that to one side, are there ways in which primary age children can do some close reading of poems, which really explore how poems work without some of these more daft ways of closing down interpretation? I think there are. A more theoretical framework for this is in the blog I did of a 'matrix of responses'. I'll make that blog: Poetry in Primary Schools 4. 

1. You vary the class teaching from working in pairs, on their own and in whole class situations. For the close reading to work, groups larger than two will probably not work so well.

2. The first question you ask the children in pairs to talk about is whether there is anything in the poem, or the poem as a whole 'reminds them of anything that has happened to them, or anything that has happened to someone they know'. You can model an answer for this question as a way of kicking things off, of course. Get them to talk in pairs for a couple of minutes and share some of these in the whole class. Then ask them to explain to each other 'why' and 'how' they are reminded.  Model this too. Then share some of these in a whole class. 

This enables the children to see that poems are not only about what they appear to be about (!) but that we as readers are 'in' poems too. Our experiences are part of the way in which we are able to interpret the poem. 

3. Second question is to follow the same pattern but invite the children to think about other poems, stories, plays, TV programmes, computer games - ie any other 'text' - and see if there is anything in the poem or the poem as a whole that reminds them of a 'text' they know. Model this. Get them to talk in pairs. Share some of the responses. Then ask 'why' and 'how'. Model this, then share some of them. 

4. The third area to get into is the children's own questions. Ask them in pairs to come up with questions about the poem as a whole: any part of the poem; questions for the poet; questions for anyone or any thing in the poem. 

Break these down one by one, modelling some questions yourself, getting them to talk in pairs and sharing in the class. When you hear the questions, write them up where they can see them. 

By the end of a few minutes you should have a good few questions. 

Talk with the whole class about which questions look interesting and puzzling enough to try and answer. Get them to talk in pairs to try to answer these questions, then share with the whole class. Get them also to discuss how to find out answers to questions that  you can't solve. Internet? Books? Someone they know? Someone you know? You could talk about going to college and how you found out answers to questions about poems, books and stories. 

5. Take stock of where you've got to with the poem. What do we know, what don't we know, what would we like to know? At this point you could introduce terminology where you thought it was relevant and helpful. Or you could hold that back for the next part of the 'looking closely'.

6. I've called this 'secret strings'. All poems hang together and express what they want to express by unstated or 'secret' means. So a poem that rhymes doesn't say 'I'm rhyming'! It just does it. Same goes for its beat, metre, or any of the sounds it uses like alliteration, assonance, repetition, 'framing', patterning into verses, rhyme schemes etc. None of it is 'announced'. Same again for the patterns of images a poem uses e.g. around a theme like 'light' or a specific colour, or a words about sadness. Same yet again for contrasts and opposites. Poems often move forwards by contrasting images or moods or scenes. These too are patterns which come 'unannounced'. But these secret strings are part of how a poem has a meaning. So, if I write:  'rain raining, rain raining, rain raining', I'm not only saying 'It's raining'. I'm also saying, 'it's raining a lot and it's going on and on.' I do that without telling it! When we look at 'secret strings' we discover how some of these poetic ways of affecting us are done

So you say to the children that they are 'poem detectives' and it's their job to find the 'secret strings'. You can model some of these: ones that are to do with sound (like rhyme, rhythm, alliteration and assonance); some to do with imagery that are 'same' and some that are to do with opposite or contrast. Then put them in pairs, with a copy of the poem in front of them, and they can draw the string in a colour on the poem. 

The rule is: if you can justify why a string is a string, it is a string. You can say that quite often the poets don't know their own strings. If they don't believe you, you can tell them that I've said it! 

So, now in pairs they hunt for strings, and then you can invite them to share these. 

You can take this one step further and invite them to come up with possible reasons why the poet made these strings, whether they poet knew it or not. 

7. After you have done these 6 stages of looking at a poem, I promise you, you will have explored many, many aspects of the poem. Some will be the same as the kinds of things that you think are important about the poem and some not. It may well change the way you think about aspects of the poem. If you are concerned that the class haven't got hold of what you think is the most important aspect of the poem, you are now in a good position to offer that to them as your view. They, meanwhile, are in a good position to examine what you say and offer their thoughts on the matter. 

Poetry and stories for primary and lower secondary schools 2.

Some teachers have told me that on occasions people who manage schools have told them that they shouldn't just be letting children read to themselves, and/or they shouldn't just be reading and enjoying poetry. The teachers need to be doing some specific teaching and the children need to be doing a set task. 

In this blog, I'm going to try to answer this. I'm going to defend the activity of reading and enjoying poetry in the primary classroom. Just that. No task. 

This involves me imagining a situation in which a teacher has to justify this in a meeting with someone who is telling that teacher that there is little or no point in simply reading and enjoying poetry. 

Please feel free to adopt or adapt any of the following:

1. Learning to read is never simply or only a matter of decoding letters. No one says that it is. In order to learn how to understand words, phrases, paragraphs, verses, chapters and books, we have to relate what's on the page with 'meaning'. There are many ways of doing this. One way is to share the enjoyment of a piece of writing. One of the ways we can do this is to read, say, perform and talk about poems. In short, then, doing poems together in class is a great way of learning how writing has meaning. The shorthand for this is 'comprehension'. I prefer the word 'interpretation' because when any of us, children or adults, talk about something like a poem, we have different views of what things in the poem, or the poem as a whole means. We have different views on how we feel about the poem. We interpret parts and the whole of poem. The discussion we have around these different interpretations are great for discovering and refining ways in which words and phrases mean things. 

So, poems are a great way of helping children learn to read for meaning. 

2. Most poems are good for saying out loud, particularly ones that have been written for children, or ones for adults that have been selected specially for children. These kinds of poems, then, have a quality in them that is potentially oral: we can pass them to each other over the airwaves. This of course is what we do with speech. These poems are then a specialised form of speech. They have been written to be said. The importance for this with children is that it makes them ideal for being a kind of 'bridge' between the oral and the written. 

Why might this be important? 

I think we know that for some - possibly many children - the written word poses a challenge. Even when some of it makes sense, other parts of it don't. By having a written form that has feet in both the oral and the written word, poems enable children to move easily between the two. Poems they hear, they can then find on the page. Poems on the page can be turned into things that can be said. 

What's more there are all sorts of hints and suggestions in poems about how to say them. And where there aren't, after a bit of reading two or three times, it's great to discover how reading poems out loud in different ways alters the meaning. In fact, every time a child engages with how to say a poem out loud, he or she actually engages with the meaning in a very easy and satisfying way. 

So, again, for a slightly different reason, poems are great ways to help children read for meaning. 

3. Real writing is never just words. As we all know, a test like the Phonics Screening Check is a list of words. That's because it is testing for children's ability to decode letters. Nearly all writing and reading outside of a test situation involves sequences of words (phrases, clauses, sentences, lines, verses, paragraphs, pages, chapters, whole books and the like). This is how we get sense from language: in sequences or groups of words. But we also get sense from context: who's saying what to whom? What are the phrases around the phrase that I'm actually reading? What happened in the poem, play or story that came before the bit I'm hearing or reading? How do plots 'unfold'? How do we 'get' character? How do flashbacks and flash forwards work? How do I know who is speaking in a story? How do I get it that some writing is about what's going in people's minds and some of it isn't? And so on. 

These are things that we have to learn if we are to understand writing. 

One of the great things about poems is that the sequences are often very memorable. This may be because they have a regular rhythm, a regular rhyme, a regular shape, sequences that have something that 'chimes' - e.g. alliteration, assonance, some other kind of 'echoing' effect, repetition of words, or phrases; symmetrical balancing of words or phrases and so on.

All this means that poems are great ways of learning how language is much more than words, but that it comes to us in groups. 

So, poems are a great way of learning that language is more than words: it's about sequences of words.

4. Flowing from all the previous points is one about dialect and 'register'. One of the problems for children reading for understanding of the written code is that writing is not speech. In other words, having spent five years learning how to speak and understand speech (and all its specific ways of going on), children have to not only learn how to lift signs off the page so that they correspond to words, they also have to unpack the particular methods that writing uses which are different from speech. These are things like: writing usually gets to the end of a train of thought without self-interrupting, without being interrupted by someone else, without repetition, without lots of hesitation, without lots of 'ums' and 'ers', without phrases like 'you know what I mean?' 'eh?' 

Writing can have a train of thought (usually a sentence) that has more subordinate clauses in it, than we usually say when we're talking. The most common of these is the relative using 'who', 'which', 'that' and sometimes 'where'. Instead: oten in speech we start a new bit beginning with an 'It', 'This' or 'That'. Quite often in writing we put subordinate clauses beginning with words like 'When', 'Because', 'Although' (and many others) in front of the main clause, when in speech we tend to put them after. (None of this is a rule, these are just tendencies). 

If, as I've said, poetry is a bridge between the oral and the written but it is itself a written form, then in a way it's a method of cheating the reader to get hold of written structures through the ear, ie orally. This is great for children to get the sound of written sequences of language. They will probably remember whole chunks of written language. It's as if they've been tricked into getting the way writing works into their heads.

So, reading poetry together is a great way to learn how writing works. 

5.  One of the tasks facing us in education is how to help children get hold of abstract thought, abstract ideas. A good deal of poetry appears to be just the opposite (by no means all of it, though). A lot of poetry is about feelings, looking closely at specific objects, processes, scenes and people. Some of it is focussed on telling a story. Some of it is focussed on the sensation of actions and processes. Some of it is about celebrating or talking about cultural features of our lives: how we eat, sing, have ceremonies, how we dress. Some of it is about the kinds of dialogues we have with others. None of this seems to be about abstract thought. 

But...

....if we invite children to talk about poems, they will inevitably select aspects of poems they enjoy or are puzzled by and the like. Sometimes this takes them very quickly into telling or describing something analogous. It may take them into telling an analogous story or anecdote. In its own way this is doing something abstract. It involves selecting one item from many from the poem, and selecting from many memories, a memory that overlaps with the one in the poem. This is in effect doing what we invite children to do when they make a 'series' out of objects in maths. It is a matter of creating a category to hold a thought from the poem and a thought in their head. Some have called these 'schemas'. So, in what may seem like quite inconsequential comments and stories, may well be something sophisticated going on: the bringing to the surface and/or the creation of schema. These may involve feelings, processes, actions, sights, scenes and much else besides. 

So, poems are a great way to help children make the transition from thinking in concrete, specific ways towards making abstractions. Or, in brief, talking about poems is a great way to help children with abstract thought.

6. It's very hard to remember how we thought of language when we were young. I have a feeling that quite a few children think that the stuff they say every day in not part of the same thing that goes on with reading and writing in school. Though we talk of the 'English language', in fact we create compartments for different kinds of usage. If I was a child again, I think it would be very easy for me to think that the specialised use of language that goes on in school, was not really 'mine'. It's something that was owned by teachers, text books, dictionaries and exams and the like. I think that one of our tasks in schools is to help children get a sense that this 'school language' can be taken over and owned by children. The great advantage of reading, hearing, performing and talking about poems, is that a good deal of them are easy to own. Parts or all of them can, with repetition, become very easy to learn off by heart. This is one way for school language to become owned by children.

So, poetry reading is a great way for children to make formal language their own.

7. Related to this is the fact that poetry in the twentieth century not only copied and adapted itself - e.g. limericks, sonnets, ballads, and the like, but started to copy and adapt any form of language that was out there. It could do this by e.g. parodying prayers, or imitating ads, mimicking the way politicians, or scientists, or teachers or anyone spoke; it could imitate street signs, street cries and much else. I often think that poetry is a 'scavenger'. Unlike almost any other use of language, poetry feels free to grab an example of a type of language-use from anywhere and play with it. 

Schools usually ask children to do something very different with language. We ask children to perform tasks to fit an already-made shape and purpose: recounts, stories with beginnings, middles and ends; sentences that contain certain fixed characteristics like fronted adverbials or relative clauses. The great thing about poetry is that it can home in on any way of speaking or writing it likes and do what it wants with it. Think of the poems in Allan Ahlberg's 'Please Mrs Butler'. A lot of them are in a 'teacher's voice'. Children hearing or reading these can get very quickly that poems can borrow anyone's way of talking. It isn't a fixed 'genre'. You can just decide to adopt a voice and run with it. 

This suggests that it's OK to treat language as something to grab, or plunder or play with. This helps children feel (as above) that language can be theirs. They can own it. 

So, poetry can help children see that language is theirs to adopt and adapt. 

8. One of the key concepts that we want to help children get hold of is 'empathy'. One way to look at empathy is to say that it is about understanding how others think and feel. Because poetry is often about a poet's thoughts and feelings, if we enjoy a poem, there is every chance that we are developing our empathy. 

There is another way to think of empathy: it is about getting to see how other people's culture(s) work. Poems are good for this too. A lot of poems (some would argue it's 'all poems' but let's leave that to one side for the moment!) express people's culture. Whether it's talking about food, home, school, hopes, fears, habits, particular ways of talking, slangs, celebrations, styles of dress, proverbs, sayings and much more, poems often show us culture. If it's done in a catchy, interesting, funny, intriguing, even sad way, we might be caught up in thinking about people who have cultures different from our own. This is another way of thinking about empathy. 

Either way, poems are great ways to help us learn empathy.

9. Related to this, poems are often about values. The poet is quite often trying to say that such-and-such is important or valuable or worthwhile. It may not be the 'thing' at the heart of the poem but the fact that the poet is looking at the 'thing', dwelling on it, or wondering about it, spending time gazing at it or trying to understand it. It may be because there is a story at the heart of the poem which indicates that one or more things are worthwhile, or significant. 

Ultimately, education will involve values, even if it's not more than saying that 'this subject is worth studying' or 'it is worthwhile for you to learn this, learn about that' or just that it's worthwhile learning, per se. 

So, poems are a great way to engage with values. 

10.  Schools spend some time in a month engaging with children's feelings. Some people do 'circle time', others do it through specific lessons. Some do it when 'issues' crop up, e.g. bullying, bereavement, loneliness and the like. Some work to a syllabus. 

Clearly, a good deal of poetry talks about feelings. They often show someone or some people experiencing something and implying or talking about emotions. 

This means that poems are a great way to bring emotions to the surface. There is an advantage in that because a poem will be about the emotions of the person/people in the poem, the reader doesn't have to talk about their own individual experience (which may be too raw, or too embarrassing to talk about directly) in order to engage with the feeling that is bothering them. The reader or listener can talk about the feelings of the person/people in the poem instead. Poems can deflect or 'contain' the emotions of the reader/listener so that they are 'safe' even as they engage with those emotions. 

So, poems can be safe ways to engage with feelings in a helpful way. 

11. Some schools do philosophy to help children think about how we think. We have different strategies for thinking about things. Across a range of poems, we come face to face with poets using different ways of thinking about things: sometimes very empirically as if they're being scientists, sometimes very speculatively as if they are 'brainstorming', sometimes relating personal experience to shared experience, sometimes in very open-ended ways, sometimes in very closed-ended ways and so on. 

This means that poems are one way we can begin a discussion about how we think and how we have different ways of thinking. We can discuss how we let emotions affect our judgement. We can discuss how sometimes we say one thing and mean another and much more. Poems often explore these areas. 

Because to engage with this requires 'interpretation', poems are a) great places to start discussions about how we think but also b) a great way to discover that we are all 'interpreters', young or old, capable of coming up with ways of making a meaning out of some words or all the words in a poem. 

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I hope these 11 points will help you justify the activity of reading, sharing, performing and talking about poems. Please note, I'm not talking here about any specific or targeted activities other than just these. In some future parts of this 'Poetry in the Primary School' I will tackle some more targeted activities. However, I don't want to suggest that 'targeted' is necessarily any better than the kinds of sharing I suggested in Poetry in the Primary School 1. Please remember that poets write poems in order that people who read them have conversations: with themselves as individuals and with others. By reading, sharing, performing and talking about poems, you will be going with the flow of the art form of poetry. You are being true to poetry. That's worth something too, of course!

Poetry and stories for primary and lower secondary schools 1.

The starting point for poetry in primary schools must be poems. That's to say, not a worksheet, not a writing exercise but a pile of poems, a set of poems, a cornucopia of poems.

The first job is for the children to see that poems can become theirs, that poets wrote poems for the likes of them, that poems belong to them.

How can we best do that?

Poems have to become part of the classroom, part of school life and poems are things that children can browse and find for themselves; poems are things that are on walls, in books that are accessible at all times; poems can be heard, shouted, whispered, sung, given accompaniments with drawings, pictures on powerpoint, music, mime, film, whatever.

One simple place to start is to come in one day and say that in 20 minutes time we're going to have a poetry show. You distribute piles of poetry books on the children's tables. You invite the children to go into pairs and choose a poem per pair. You ask them to prepare a poem per pair for the poetry show that you're going to have in 20 minutes time. You tell them that they can perform the poem in anyway they like: taking turns, saying it together, singing some of it or all of it, tapping out a rhythm, miming it, making noises to go with it - leaving out words or lines for the rest of the class to guess...etc etc.

20 minutes later, you hold the poetry show. For this first one, you m.c. the show making a big deal of it, making sure that everyone is ready and quite to hear each performance and giving each one applause.

At the end of the show of approx fifteen performances, you invite the children in their pairs to consider what aspects of each other's performances would they consider trying out for the next poetry show. This is a positive way to do criticism and builds the idea that you are a team trying to help each other get better and better at poetry together. If there was something you noticed that no one mentions you can chip in with. If there's something that you think might be worth trying e.g. making the sound of sea 'behind' a performance, you suggest that too. 

A day later, or a two days later, or three days later or a week later you do the same again. Whatever interval you set up, you repeat, so there is an expectation for this activity to happen again and again. This is very important.

You keep this going for as long as there is enthusiasm. 

You can vary the format by e.g. you and a child having a go. Involve the TAs. Widen the choice of poems. Let the children go back to favourites. Try using powerpoint, try making 'shoe boxes' to represent poems. Try doing paintings. If you're used to one of the animation apps, try that. 

What is all this about?

This is not only about helping a class 'possess' poems, it is giving them a 'repertoire'. Each time you do the 'show', you might be covering 15 poems. You're building up many ways of how poems work. You're enabling the children to have poems in their minds, bodies and voices.  

I can promise you that they will become enthusiastic about poetry because you're showing that you believe in poems and you believe in them. The point here is that poems are doing the work, and that's because poems have 'hooks'. Poets are people who write poems so that they 'stick' to readers and listeners: whether that's rhyme, rhythm, imagery, shape, repetition or whatever, each line of a poem holds within it the efforts of a poet to grab the attention of a reader or listener. These hooks are the most cogent argument for poetry - not commentary, not worksheets, but the poem itself.

Don't necessarily expect dramatic results immediately. Give it two or three sessions for the pattern to develop of performance/discussion/learning from each other/performance to take hold. 

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Alongside this, it's worth thinking about what else you can do to make a poetry-friendly classroom.
A bookshelf or bookcase of poetry books. 
You could try writing out a poem a week on a huge bit of paper. 
Invite the children to put post-its on and around the poem with comments and questions. On the day you're going to change the poem to a new one (a week later?) collect up the post-its and get the children to talk about them e.g. handing them out to pairs, followed by a plenary. If there are questions, discuss how best to answer them. 
Watch or listen to poets performing their poems on CD, video, online or wherever. 
Get poets to come to school.
Organise a poetry cabaret evening involving parents and grandparents. Make sure that it only lasts about half an hour interspersed with music, dance and perhaps an art show. 
Invite the children to make their own personal poetry anthologies. Give them each a nice notebook and tell them they can copy out any poem, part of a poem, song, part of a song, or any 'line' from something they hear on TV or on the radio that sounds interesting or caught their imagination - perhaps from a film. You do the same and show them your anthology and where you're collecting your poems and parts of poems and sayings from. This 'models' making an anthology. 


Poetry in Primary Schools 2 will be about what happens if someone comes into  your room and says, 'How can you justify spending time on this stuff?' 

Poetry in Primary Schools 3 will be about interesting and exciting ways of reading poems in a critical way suitable for primary schools.

Poetry in Primary Schools 4 will be about interesting and exciting ways of writing poems. 

These pages are all inter-connected. However your base is in reading poems together and sharing poems in a poetry-friendly classroom. It's here that poems do the 'work' for you. They will engender the enthusiasm and excitement you need. 

(Most of these ideas and many more are in 'What is Poetry? An Essential Guide to Reading and Writing Poetry' published by Walker Books. In that book, I have a section on some poems I've written and how I came to write them. 

Media does Groundhog Day with old, white depressed men in industrial decline zones.

How many programmes have you watched where depressed and saddened men in their late 50s or older are sitting in a half-empty pub saying that the area round here used to be a flourishing industrial place and then following that up with the observation that Labour have deserted them? (or in the US, the Democrats)?

It's clearly 'true' in the sense that this is what some real people are feeling and saying. However, it fascinates me why the TV always seems to show this as a story about how these men's views end up with them levelling the blame at the party that appears to have deserted them even though a good deal of the reason why their world has crashed is to do with the 'other side' just as much, if not more ie the Tories and/or the Republicans? 

Maybe it's the perceived betrayal by Labour/Democrats that hurts most. In which case, why vote for the other lot instead - if that's what's happening in, say, Sunderland or Hartlepool or Pennsylvania? 

 We shall see if that really is the case in the UK or just a media confection.


Meanwhile, the TV programmes of course can't propose any alternative, on account of their own brief. (This is an example of how the media create the 'field' of the discussion and can't break out of it.)

So, for example, under a capitalist system, where there is poverty, which then creates bad housing, capitalism ('the market') can't swing round, change tack, employ and pay people to improve that housing, even though that this is the need. Unless there is state or local government investment for need, the system can only create these pools of poverty and loss.

We are left, then, with news item after news item after news item of old, sad men in empty pubs saying that they won't vote Labour/Democrat. 

Grammar: 'No smoking' or 'Don't smoke!'? And other questions.

Anyone going through the requirements of the primary school grammar test (GPS) will have come across something that strikes quite a few people as odd: commands and exclamations.

It seems odd because what's going on here is that grammarians have classified how we speak and write according to what they think are grammatical systems. These systems juggle grammatical 'rules'  (e.g. a singular subject should determine the singular form of the verb as in 'The cat eats...' ) with structure (e.g. to ask a question in English, we hardly ever 'invert' a main verb anymore: we don't usually say, 'Go I to the pub?') with meaning: (e.g. I can only call 'very' an adverb in the phrase 'very good spaghetti' because I know what 'very' means) with function (e.g. the auxiliary verb 'have' in 'I have eaten the banana' is serving the function of indicating a way of talking about an event that has happened.)

So 'grammar' juggles with rules, structures, meaning and function.

When the GPS first appeared, many people were surprised that suddenly out of the blue there were only two 'allowed' way to exclaim: in structures following 'what' and 'how'; and there was only one 'allowed' way to command: in structures using the 'imperative' form of verbs: as in 'Go to bed!', 'Stop running! and the like.

What's going on here is that 'grammar' (as defined by GPS) lays a matrix over language, chops language up in certain ways and says that only specific kinds of structures or rules can fit the term that 'grammar' has devised. In real life, we know full well that we can 'exclaim' and 'command' in many different ways. We can use exclamation marks in all sorts of ways too. You only have to read fiction, poetry and look at ads to see that.

Now let's consider this way of looking at language in relation to 10/11 year olds children reading and writing. What do we want them to do? Understand and enjoy what they're reading; write and talk in lots of different ways, for different purposes; to know that language is owned, created and changed by all of us. It doesn't belong to a small group of people who 'know best'. Unlike, private swimming pools, we can all access great uses of language for free,  simply by reading or listening to it in schools, libraries, online and so on. What's more we can make it our own by imitating it and adapting it. Some terms to describe what we're doing are very helpful - so long as they don't become the reason why we're doing it.

Back to commands and exclamations: I would argue that these are indeed fascinating parts of our repertoire of language. We all use them and use them often. However, the ways we do it differ and vary and each kind has 'nuance' - subtle differences of meaning, tone, function and intention.

So, rather than laying a grammarian's matrix over command and exclaim, I would suggest we collect up as many ways we can think of, of commanding and exclaiming, examine the differences in meaning, tone, function and intention.

When we've done that, aren't we just that bit better at knowing how and why someone is saying/writing these things to me, and I'm much better at making choices about saying/writing these things?

Here's an example:

I mentioned 'No smoking' in the previous blog. It's a very odd construction. In theory, it's a phrase you could use outside of its usual context where it's a mixture of an instruction and an order.

"I went into the dole office and it was free of cigarettes. No smoking. None at all.'

That's a common way of writing available to us from at least since Dickens' time.

So how do we know that 'No smoking' in a train, means something like, 'You can't smoke here' or 'There must be no smoking here' or 'Smoking is not allowed here'? We know from several contexts: we've seen it many times before and had it explained to us; the sign saying 'No smoking' is nearly always in the same places and looks similar; we know that 'smoking' and 'no smoking' is a big deal in public places...and so on. We use the contexts to tell us it is in its own way a command.

But why doesn't it say, 'Don't smoke!' - the 'command' as determined by GPS. Does 'Don't smoke!' mean the same thing as 'No smoking'? If so, how?

So, if I use a particular kind of grammar will I help create a particular kind of meaning, a particular kind of response from people hearing or reading what I say/write?  And how does context work in this situation? Is it an invisible 'grammar' which traditional grammar can't see, hear or describe and yet it crucial to how we communicate to each other about smoking in public places? 

A few notes on what teaching grammar to 9-11 year olds could be like (in my dreams!)

Grammar.

What could a reasonable, helpful grammar course in Key Stage 2 look like - if it wasn't dominated by a test that was introduced for the sole purpose of measuring teacher performance? The GPS (formerly SPaG)  was introduced on the mistaken and incorrect basis that 'grammar, punctuation and spelling' have 'right/wrong' answers in the Bew Report in 2011 without a word of evidence. 

1. What is grammar?

This question is complicated by the fact that we use the word  'grammar' in two different ways: 

a) the way a language is structured and  the way it functions.

b) the terms we use to describe these structures and functions.

Because people are so used to talking about some specific terms (noun, verb, subordinate clause etc), it's easy to think that this 'is' grammar. It isn't. It's just the terms that many people have devised. We see the complication this gives us when those who make up the terms ('grammarians') argue with each other.

Here's an example. 

'After the ball, everyone went to the pub.'

'After the ball was over, everyone went to the pub.'

How should we describe the word 'after'?

If you use terms to describe English with exactly the same terms you would use to describe Latin, then in the first sentence, 'after' is a 'preposition'. In the second example, 'after' is a 'subordinate conjunction'. 

If you use terms which, you think are based at least in part on 'meaning' then you will have to come up with a single term which is the same for both. Some grammarians do this. 

Just to be clear, I'm agnostic on this matter. I'm just observing that grammarians disagree on what to call this word. This shows us that terminology is not the same as grammar. 

2. Behaviour

If I was helping to devise a course in grammar,  I would start with trying to convey the idea that language is a part of human behaviour. It is not a self-enclosed, sealed up system that can be talked about solely as if it is simply or only a kind of code. People use language for different reasons. So, the starting point for me is to explore how, where and why do we use language. We could look at the 'edges' of language where we use gesture, noises, signals, signs and the like to communicate ideas and feelings. We could look at the fact we use language across a huge range of situations: drama, film, chat, instructions, song, poetry, ads, computers, texts, emails. In this range of situations, we use language to convey feeling, to exchange ideas, to 'talk to myself', to make rules, to lie, to deceive...and for many other reasons - what reasons?  

3. Good use of language, good writing, etc. 

Whatever shapes we use when we make language, we use them because they are part of these different kinds of behaviour. There is no such thing as 'good language' per se. 'Good' depends on situation, context, and purpose. Is it 'good' for a specific purpose and function? This is a crucial point that is almost completely overlooked by the present way of teaching and testing grammar. Good writing for an instruction on a train is very different from good writing for constructing an argument in an essay or  for a song you hope will be popular. This is a vital principle.

4. Analogy: buildings. 

When we look at buildings we can see that builders, engineers and architects from the beginning of human civilisation have operated on the basis of structure and function. If you build a house on a flood plain, it's a good idea to use stilts. If you live in a fantastically hot country, then thick walls and small windows is a good idea. Across the thousands of types of buildings across the world, we can identify many kinds of structure-and-function going on. As a preliminary to talking about language, this analogy might well help convey the idea of 'structure and function'. A short tour of a school or house would offer some good evidence of 'structure and function' - beams to hold buildings up, windows to let in light, doors to block off one room from another...etc etc.

5. Language has some analogies with this. 

It has structure and function within the different uses, which are in turn part of human behaviour. The simplest most interesting way of doing this is to collect some different language uses from around us: slogans on school walls ('Achieve! Aspire!); fire instructions; poems, stories, playground games; songs, prayers; non-fiction; comics; graphic novels;  captions; computer-speak. These are all 'real' examples of language-in-use. This should always be the starting-point of talking about grammar and not the bogus, made-up sentences much loved by grammar exercises. 

6. Having collected up these examples...

...we can do a mix of investigation and instruction. It's for teachers to decide on the balance here. Assuming, let's say, you decide to teach some of the key terms: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction, preposition, phrase, clause..., you could then look at these different real examples to see how the language varies and why. 'No smoking' is very different from 'Please don't smoke'. The grammar is very different. The aim of the language is similar.  But does it have a different effect on the reader/listener? Why? That tiny exercise can be reproduced a thousands times across different language-uses. You can turn this into role plays and games. 

7. Grammar terms are not consistent... 

...in whether they are specifically to do with purely naming, or purely identifying a function. So, for example, the word 'conjunction' ends up being a word to name a kind of word whilst at the same time describing its function ie to 'conjoin',  but 'verbs' don't verb, nouns don't noun. The function is not contained within the term. There is a loose way in which simple grammar tries to do this with such over-simplifications (some would say 'distortions') with descriptions like 'a verb is a doing word'. In reality, verbs don't do any more doing than any other word! They don't simply describe doing or even represent doing. We structure our feelings, instructions, actions, states of being, using words that we make work in different ways - but never on their own. They are linked and work with each other, like cogs. A cog isn't a functioning cog unless it has another cog to function with. So, just as a log is a log and not a beam until it is in a house being a beam, so a verb is not a verb until it's in a structure being a verb. So, it's not that verbs are 'doing words' (or some such) but they are words that are cogs which mesh, for example,  mostly with nouns and pronouns, which act as 'subjects' and 'objects' of verbs: 'I'm going out',  'He hit me' and so on.  

These analogies with cogs or buildings,  I'm suggesting, will help children understand what's going on much better than the misleading business of  naming parts of speech. And it is this understanding that helps us write.

8. A key part of understanding grammar is making up new stuff. 

We can do this with imitation, parody, and invention. This is the best way to use our knowledge of language to improve writing. Ask any writer of any kind and they'll tell you (confess!) the many ways in which they've imitated and parodied others. This doesn't just apply to 'creative' writers of poems, stories, plays, scripts, songs but also the writers of instructions, ads, newspaper articles, headlines, blurbs, political speeches, telling jokes and so on. I'd suggest that a key part of learning about grammar can come this way. We can mix the use of the terms as a way of trying to describe the imitations and parodies with the actual process of writing those imitations and parodies. It's unwise and unhelpful of doing this in the old ways, 'let's think of a noun', as this is isolating words from their function.