poetryclass - poetry workshop

Improvisation in Rhyme and Rhythm

A series of linked, introductory, improvisation exercises in rhyme and rhythm for use with students of any age. Adult education students and secondary school pupils can be invited to contribute in turn or to volunteer answers; most Y4s, Y5s and Y6s can be 'funnelled' towards the answers through simple, rhythmical, repetitious verse-forms; suitably modified, these exercises can also work well with infants and with children with learning difficulties and language disorders.

These exercises are designed to explore patterned language, to encourage a sense of rhythm and rhyme, to develop spelling and sound patterns, phonological awareness, consonant clusters, vowel phonemes and rhythmical speech through recognition and repetition. Whereas prose allows the restrictions of a child's life to limit the possibilities on the page (you write the way you talk, and you talk the way you think) the heightened, patterned self-conscious language of poetry can encourage a sense of the magic of words, the pleasure of hidden rhymes, the poetry in everyday subjects, the economy, precision and richness of rhythm, the power of learning by heart, and the value of memory and anticipation.

1. Rhyming Names

Craig who has the plague, Nichola the tickler ...

2. I Spy Rhyming

There's something in this classroom that sounds like a feeling, a creature ...

3. Foods Poets Should Avoid

Never drink beer or you'll get diarrhoea, never eat meat or you'll get cold feet ...

4. Animals that Make Bad Pets for Poets

Don't play with a flamingo or you'll end up playing bingo ...

5. Countries that Poets Should Avoid on Holiday

Never go to Spain or you'll lose your brain, never go to Sri Lanka ...

6. Whole class improvisations:

'Hush Little Baby' (you control the rhymes by providing the 'If that something don't something' lines)

'I'm a Dingle Dangle Scarecrow' (you prepare the second lines of new verses)

'The House That Jack Built' (this is the pen that Lee lost, etc).

'There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly' (what did she eat next?)

After an hour of this, most students are usually ready to attempt writing whole-class or individual rhyming poems.

Y1 T1 T6
- To recite stories and rhymes with predictable and repeating patterns, extemporising
on patterns orally by substituting words and phrases, inventing patterns and
playing with rhyme.

Y1 T2 T13
- To substitute and extend patterns from reading through language play, e.g. by using
same lines and introducing new words, extending rhyming or alliterative patterns,
adding further rhyming words, lines.

Y1 T3 T16
- To compose own poetic sentences, using repetitive patterns, carefully selected
sentences and imagery.

Y3 T1 T12
- To collect suitable words and phrases, in order to write poems and short descriptions;
design simple patterns with words, use repetitive phrases; write imaginative
comparisons.

Andy Croft