Ideas for poetry exercises in the classroom

Each school visit will vary, depending on the age group you work with and the specific brief.

You’ll want to plan each visit in consultation with the teacher, taking into account the theme, the structure of the school day, the layout of the space, what resources you’ll have, and any learning requirements the group might have. Sometimes you’ll work with the same group for a whole day or even a more sustained period, e.g. a writing residency, but sometimes you’ll move from one class to the next over the course of a day. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to planning but it always helps to have a few warm-up exercises to hand. Here are a couple of ideas for poetry exercises.

Playing with metaphor

Metaphor is one of the most powerful poetic tools out there but it can be tricky for pupils to get their head around until they see it in action. An easy way to get them used to metaphors is to encourage them to create their own. Start by asking them to think of items they might find in their kitchen or classroom, or in a fictional universe. Get them to write these separately on slips of paper and put them in a box at the front. Now, as a class, brainstorm a list of objects, ideas or people unconnected to the items they thought of before, e.g. celebrities, or abstract concepts like hope and love, or moments in the calendar. Write these on the board.

Ask the pupils to choose one of the things written on the board and pick a slip of paper from the box at random. They should then put those things together to form a metaphor and try to come up with a way of elaborating. For instance, they might come up with:

Hope is a frying pan – you can hear it sizzle. Birthdays are a lunchbox – they open to reveal delicious treats.

Sometimes the metaphor won’t make sense, but that’s the fun of it – the more unexpected the metaphor, the more the pupils have to use their imagination!

List poems

List poems can be a great way to ease pupils into writing poetry. The simple structure of a list makes the writing activity less daunting for pupils who may lack confidence.

Begin by choosing a sentence starter that will form the basis of the list. This should be a phrase that every pupil can respond to, such as ‘I like…’, ‘I come from…’, or ‘I need…’. Ask the pupils to brainstorm ways to complete the phrase. You can help them out by suggesting categories. For instance, if you choose ‘I like…’, you might ask them to list a colour, a type of food, a hobby, a song, a family member or friend.

Once they have assembled a generous list, ask them to select their favourite items and expand on them, e.g. by adding some description or a simile. They’ll quickly build up a poem that might look something like this:

I like orange, the colour of autumn leaves, I like ice cream, so cold it freezes my brain, I like dancing, twirling like a sycamore seed, I like Aunty Jo, cuddly as a cushion.

To stretch pupils, you could encourage them to think about how diverging from the structure might add a clever twist to their poem. For example, could they end with a line about something they don’t like? Is there anything surprising they can add to the list?