Details
Author: Myra Barrs and Sue Ellis with a contribution by Morag Styles
ISBN: 872267 07 6
Based on a successful radio series, Hands on Poetry helps teachers to put poetry within the reach of all children and provides numerous ways of working with poetry in the classroom. Drawing together a broad range of ideas and activities, it includes suggestions for developing children's understanding of poetry through talk and drama, reading and writing, music and art. The tried and tested ways of working described here make this highly illustrated publication an invaluable resource for primary teachers.
“Straightaway this booklet has two great strengths: first is the sheer range of its contents. You might be put off by the price for fewer than 50 stapled pages but it is remarkable what is covered here and a glance at the contents table should dispel doubts. What is on offer, and what makes the booklet's limited scale its real strength, is nothing short of a curriculum for poetry, with chapters addressing naturally the reading and writing of poetry by children, plus crucially advice on how to establish links with children's experiences of other art forms - Music, Drama, Art - and most important perhaps a chapter on “Poetry across the curriculum".
There isn't anything here maybe that's new or radical, but that is exactly the book's second appeal: it does seek throughout to make poetry seem accessible to all children and manageable by all teachers. For more detailed texts on, say, the writing of poetry a teacher needs the BP Teachers' Poetry Resources File from the Poetry Society, or on children responding to poetry Brian Merrick's Exploring Poetry from NATE, both of which are included in Hands On Poetry's helpful bibliography. So while the booklet hasn't space for a thorough exploration of the poetry-writing process, it can set out in Chapter 10 numerous ways in which a classroom can become a publishing house for children - I've counted nearly thirty ideas and examples on just two pages! Now you begin to see why the booklet is real value for money.
If I have any complaint with this publication - and I'm trying very hard not to - then it's just to do with which classrooms exactly it is intended for: its CLPE origins should make the primary context obvious, but then why does it recommend (more than once) that teachers seek out Richard Andrews' book Into Poetry which is explicitly secondary orientated, and not mention, even in the bibliography, Catapults and Kingfishers - teaching poetry in primary schools by Pie Corbett and Brian Moses? And more to the point why are there no examples of KS1 children's writing anywhere? Do London infants not write poems? Well not so much a complaint as a quibble and that said the directness of Hands on Poetry's style, the scope of its contents and the engaging nature of the children's poems (and photos) that are included don't half make you want to roll up your sleeves and get those hands dirty.”
David Horner
Language and Learning April/May 1996