Category: Uncategorized
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Greetings for 2018! January may be cold and murky, but poetry is as fun and exciting as you make it – any time of the year. With this term’s Flying Carpet theme, we’ll be sweeping up and away to brighter, more colourful places in my workshops – unless anyone’s capsizes and lands on the school…
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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…
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Poetry workshops for autumn I’m excited to be preparing for the fresh, new school year, and in particular, for this crisp, atmospheric season. Every term and season brings new inspiration for poetry writing, and you can’t beat autumn, with its fiery trees and fascinating leaves, its Halloween shadows and Guy Fawkes Night dazzles, with the…
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This term (summer), I offered a range of themes for my workshops, as usual, but every school chose the same one – Sea and Sand. And no wonder! It’s a wonderful theme – fun, beautiful and refreshing for a hot day, and relevant to the many children will be heading off to the seaside this…
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Children need opportunities to be creative. With the arts as their tools, they can share their fast-growing wealth of thoughts, feelings and experiences, consolidating their learning in the process. Yet, teachers tell me, there’s little room for creativity in today’s curriculum. However often I hear this, it’s always shocks me, though I can see it…
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When children sit down to write a poem, they face many challenges. They have to think what, exactly, they want to say, how they want to start, what words to use, how to arrange them, how to fit them into a few lines, how to make the piece look and sound like a poem (rather…
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Children learn about all sorts of facts and figures through the national curriculum. Then they come to one of my poetry sessions where there are no facts or figures, and fly – no problem. I’m amazed by children. They don’t pester me with ifs or buts; they don’t giggle behind their hands or stare at…
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Welcome back, teachers! How about some sparkly poetry fun to brighten up your wintry classrooms? Once children start dreaming up imagery for an exciting poem, winter gloom disappears and glittering possibilities take over. Ideas ricochet off the walls, are caught, twisted and sent whizzing again, from mind to mind, and by writing time there’s so…
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Hello schools, Apologies for the impersonal, round-robin flyer you’ve probably received from me again, and glad my method hasn’t put you off following the links. My workshops, by contrast, encourage personal expression, and I try to give each child in a group individual support and sharing opportunities. The new academic year always arrives with a…
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If you’re a teacher, you should be clocking out and making your escape now, rather than thinking ahead to next term! But as you’re here, I’ll provide a few details about the poetry sessions I’ll be offering this autumn. My theme choices will be: Streets – with their bustle and noises by day and, for…
Kate Williams 