Today in Year 2, we started learning a little bit more about poetry. We spoke about how it’s important to read aloud to help us understand more about what we are reading. We have been reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as our class reader at the end of the day. Our teacher recently read us a chapter called Augustus Gloop Goes up the Pipe and Mrs Gloop had a very loud voice, as she was panicking about her son’s fate. Meanwhile, we discussed why Charlie Bucket might have a quieter voice. We decided that this was because he is quite a shy child, especially compared to the other characters that we meet in the book.
We spoke about how we can use emphasis when we read to change the meaning of a sentence or phrase. We practiced this with our learning partners as we read the sentence ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’, placing emphasis on different words. We then discussed volume and how this also makes a difference to understanding characters and emotions. To warm up, we counted from 1 to 10, counting on a scale. We went from using our quietest voice to gradually using our loudest!
We then read a lovely poem by Joshua Seigal called What’s in a Poem? We spoke about some of the different features that we noticed, that there were lots of adjectives describing interesting nouns. We looked at the phrase “a scrumptious slice of birthday cake” and thought about why the author chose to use the word scrumptious instead of yummy or delicious. A few of us noticed that the letters of scrumptious and slice are the same! We found out that this is called alliteration and we also saw it in the description of a “busy buzzy bumblebee”.
We read the poem again ourselves, annotating the parts of the poem where we might use more emphasis, or speak quickly or slowly. After this, the computer put us into random groups where we focused on one particular verse of the poem. We then had to work with our groups to decide how we would say each line. We had time to practice our verses before performing them in front of the class!
We had a great time performing this in front of our friends and we then eventually performed our verses in order and completed the whole poem. We hope to do more of this soon!
Do you have a favourite poem? If so, what is it and why?
I liked doing our poem. It was really fun and it was really fun.
I love doing the groups of doing a poem. it was really fun with my Group. I was in group one.
I loved doing the poems it was really fun to do it was one of the funnest activities I have done in my classroom. I also stood up and performed it to the whole class with my group. It was fun and interesting.
I loved learning our poem because we got to worked together