Performance Poetry: learning to speak in front of others
During the Autumn term, Year 2 enjoyed learning, innovating and performing poetry.
The children’s favourite poets were Michael Rosen and Spike Milligan. The classes had great fun listening to and learning different poems, especially ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’, which was a firm favourite.
To help the children learn the poem, they illustrated a copy of the poem to bring their visualisations to life. The children enjoyed evaluating each other’s ideas to support their recall of key vocabulary from the poem. Year 2 then learnt the poem off by heart, as a whole class.
The children enjoyed nonsense poetry so much that we decided to explore another poem ‘The Giant’s Rucksack’. We explored the interesting and unusual vocabulary in the poem before innovating our own versions. The children worked carefully to keep the same rhyming patterns, rhythm and structure, but they changed the nonsense words, to create their own versions which they performed to the class.
