Category: Uncategorized
-
Teachers – these four winter poems of mine can be enjoyed by your class in different ways: simply by listening, or by a mix of listening and pausing to discuss, or by listening twice and thinking up alternatives to selected words along the way, or by sketching while listening, or by taking a line and…
-
Attention Primary Schools! Hello teachers! My virtual poetry workshops are continuing after Christmas, with the following topic choices: WILD WOODS, SPACE, CREEPY-CRAWLIES, DRAGONS, SPRING ANIMALS, CASTLES. Please take your pick, with one per day. My prices are very competitive, and my sessions combine fun with poetic exploration, keeping everyone…
-
This verse is part of a 4-seasoned sequence, published in the anthology, Read Me At School, Macmillan, 2009: The Trees Behind the Teachers’ Cars (Autumn Term) Behind the cars the trees have turned to treasure –red as rubies, gold as gold bars. If Sir was a piratehe’d be cramming his boot with booty,except that it’s…
-
Christmas Colours will inspire any child to put pen to paper, especially with beautiful, bright lights and pictures for stimulus, and whole-body enactments of spinning baubles and flashing lights! These are the sorts of activities included in my virtual poetry sessions, along with singing and clapping to ukulele (younger), word-building challenges, poems to listen to,…
-
Fireworks are fantastic to write about at pretty well any time of the year, and in any weather. Just switch the imagination button if necessary. But in the depths of a dark, frosty British November, any firework poem is sure to be inspired! Celebrate creatively! Children love to be fireworks, shooting, spinning, exploding, and to…
-
A poem of mine for Halloween and the winter ahead: Wicked Winter Tree, published in Moondust & Mystery, Oxford University Press, 2002 , and in The Iron Book of Tree Poems, Iron Press, earlier this year. I also included it in my own book, Swinging through the Sky (now out of print but available second…
-
Hocus-Pokus – Covid-Focused Halloween 2020 (UK) Please click image to enlarge. Scroll down for more. And a few more I’ve just thought up (lockdowns free up time for this sort of thing): Will we meet a spooky ghost? No, he’s locked-down, eating toast. Or nasty witches on their sticks? Maybe, but no more than six.…
-
Halloween offers a great opportunity to get rhyming, with crazy magic spells. Not everyone wants to be turned into a frog – or worse, but who says spells have to be nasty? Here are some ideas for concocting happy, harmless wishes – if a bit daft, all in rhyming couplets. They’re fun for children to…
-
Autumn can seem a melancholy time – even without a pandemic hanging over us – but autumn trees and leaves offer wonderful pick-me-ups. The darker the sky, the more fiery they can look, and the wilder the wind, the more carefree their movements. Then the sun slips through and the glow of gold, bronze, brass,…
-
My poem, ‘What do you do on a nature walk?’ is published – for the 4th time! – this week in A Word Full of Poems, Dorling Kindersley. My contribution, among many others: What do you do on a nature walk? We have an adventure, that’s what – crunching through the undergrowth,…
Kate Williams 