This week, the children have studied two different types of poems.
Firstly, the children studied renga poems, which is a genre of Japanese collaborative poetry with alternating stanzas. Within renga poems, the first and third lines have 5 syllables and the second, fourth and fifth lines have 7 syllables. Working in pairs, the children tried to generate their own lines to create a collaborative class poem based on rivers, as our topic title this term is ‘River of Life’.
Then, the children were introduced to free verse poetry and narrative poetry. Free verse poetry allows the author to have complete artistic freedom as there are no specific rules to follow. The children looked at some examples of free verse and narrative poems based on rivers and identified similarities and differences. Then, the children had their own go at writing a free verse and narrative poem, either describing the river as something else or describing the journey of the river.
Once completed, the children wrote up their poem and illustrated it with beautiful pictures. To end off poetry week, the children enjoyed listening to one another’s poems.
