"A clear, practical and generous resource that helps teachers bring poetry alive in the primary classroom through accessible ideas for reading, performing, appreciating and writing poetry."
This title is available to purchase directly from the Bloomsbury website here.
Poetry can do something rather wonderful in a classroom. It can make children laugh, pause, listen differently and find their own voices; and, as Rasinski’s work on reading fluency reminds us, rhythm, rhyme, repeated reading and performance can also play an important part in developing children’s confidence, expression and comprehension in reading.
It can be spoken, whispered, chanted, performed, illustrated, questioned and played with. And yet, poetry can still sometimes feel like the part of English that teachers feel least confident about.
This is why 100 Ideas for Primary Teachers: Poetry by Adam Bushnell and Frankie O’Reilly is such a welcome book.
It is practical, accessible and immediately useful. It does not treat poetry as something precious or untouchable, or as something to be decoded only by those who already “get it”. Instead, it opens poetry up as something alive and generous: something children can read, hear, perform, appreciate and write for themselves.
In this National Year of Reading, when schools are being encouraged to think again about reading as pleasure, possibility and connection, this book feels particularly timely. A love of reading is not only built through novels and story books, wonderful though they are. It can also be built through rhythm, repetition, surprise, image and voice.
One of the real strengths of the book is its clear structure. It is exactly the kind of resource a busy teacher can dip in and out of. It could support a single lesson, refresh a poetry unit, build confidence in performance, or bring poetry into another curriculum area.
The range is impressive too, with ideas linked to poetic structure, language devices, cross-curricular poetry, performance, writing and diverse poetic voices.
I also like that the book recommends poems without printing them in full. Rather than limiting the reader, this encourages teachers and children to go hunting for poems, using resources such as Poetry By Heart, building class anthologies and creating poetry bookshelves.
I would warmly recommend it to anyone wanting poetry to become something children experience, remember and perhaps even come to love.
Rasinski, T. V. (2004). Creating fluent readers. Educational Leadership, 61(6), 46–51.
This title is available to purchase directly from the Bloomsbury website here.
| Primary Genre | Books for Teachers |
| Other Genres: |
This title is available to purchase directly from the Bloomsbury website here. No matter what you teach, there is a 100 Ideas title for you!
100 Ideas for Primary Teachers: Poetry features in the following genres: Books for Teachers, Recommendations, Poetry Books for Children, Children’s / Teenage poetry, anthologies, annuals, Children’s, Teenage and Educational
Paperback. £13.50, down from the £15.00 cover price. Not Available.
100 Ideas for Primary Teachers: Poetry was written by Adam Bushnell, Frankie O'Reilly and published by Bloomsbury Education
100 Ideas for Primary Teachers: Poetry has 160 pages
Yes it is part of 100 Ideas for Teachers series
£13.50, reduced from £15.00. Not Available.
