Kate Williams

HARVEST POETRY-WRITING

As your fruit ripens and your crops mature, gather words and rhythms to celebrate your harvest. Show your class the beauties of sweet, juicy fruits, and help them appreciate the annual miracle of food grown out of the ground. Inspire them to capture the wonder of your local yield in writing. They’ll love framing their poem in a fruit shape or decorating the page with golden wheat sheafs and climbing beans, perhaps.

CELEBRATE WITH ALL SENSES

Before writing, provide some real harvest produce to hold and inspect close up.  Encourage your children to consider them with all their senses. What do they smell, taste and feel like? How do they feel in your hand? Prompt for interesting words like scent, fragrance, aroma, flavour, sugary, luscious, smooth, glossy, silky, bulging, heavy, weighty, wobbly, intricate, symmetrical. Then, of course, there are the colours to consider – crimson, luminous green, yellow as the sun…

POEM STARTER IDEAS

Give your class a starter line, such as:

‘I love…’
‘I am [a harvest item]’
‘What am I? I have…’
‘From a ____ tree I fell’
‘As orange as _____ , as golden as_____’
Or go for cinquains.

CINQUAIN EXAMPLE

These 5-line poems draw the writer’s attention to different poetic techniques, line by line, so they’re great for all-round skill-building. They also provide a simple format to follow. There are variations, so I’d suggest checking out a few examples if in doubt – not that you have to stick to any rules. It’s creative writing fun, not an exam!

Here’s an example I made up this morning, sitting by my apple tree in the late summer sun:

APPLE CINQUAIN 

Ripe, rosy, round
Dangling, dropping, rolling
Fragrant as the fresh-mown grass
Snack on a stem
Marvel

Kate Williams

INDEPENDENT WRITING

You may have a different starter line in mind, so go for it! Mature and confident writers will probably prefer to think up their own, so do encourage individual approaches and developments too.

HEALTHY EATING LINK

Make the most of this focus on food sources to help children appreciate wholesome, natural food, such as fresh fruits and vegetables. Talk about the vitamins, minerals, fibre and all-round goodness they offer.

Click here for fruit and healthy-eating poetry resources (you can browse without buying!) 

POETRY WORKSHOPS available to book now, for September onwards! See Workshops page.

Kate
Email: katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com