Flying Carpets will feature in my spring term topic choices, along with Dragons, Space and Spring. Children can fly with any of these – not just the flying carpets, venturing wherever their ideas lead them.
Dragons are forever popular, and on Wales’s St David’s Day (March 1st), you can almost feel the hot breath of the Welsh Dragon in the celebrations, making spring an ideal time for fiery and mysterious dragon poetry.
It may be hard to believe that spring is round the corner, but by half term, there’ll be plenty of signs showing, which we can celebrate in lively, colourful poems. If it’s raining, no problem – the drizzle and mud can feature alongside hatching eggs and opening buds.
Space is wide open as a topic as well as an entity: we can shoot about wherever we like in the boundless void, discovering any sort of planets and creatures we happen to dream up, which makes for wonderfully imaginative poetry. With younger children, I focus in on stars and aliens, and you’d be amazed how much there is to say, sing and write about stars alone.
As for flying carpets, they can go anywhere, of course – through any skies in any weather at any speed and in any style, with whatever fascinating view below that the individual writer sees in their mind’s eye.
There’ll be scope for humour as well as atmosphere and action, and where time permits, we’ll be clapping and singing rhyming couplets, as we invent them – even in the top classes. Music and language have many meeting and merging points, which I like to bring out in my sessions, along with opportunities for drama and artwork. Children take what they want from the many different angles of a session, to express their ideas in their ways. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next term!
Kate
Email: katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com
Kate Williams 
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