Hearts and Partners

Thematic Poetry from the NEAB Anthology

Mixed Ability Year 10

Background Information: My Year 10 group had not studied GCSE poetry before. Indeed, most of them groaned when I announced that we were going to do a poetry unit. Thus, the lesson plans that follow are an example of how I take an active approach to studying texts; accessing the seven multiple intelligences, and using a variety of teaching/learning strategies to enable all pupils to understand the poems.

LESSON ONE: "Understanding the Process" and "Pre-Text Activities"

The Big Picture: Using the Language Process Model shown above, I explained to pupils the process through which they would read, analyse, deconstruct poetry, so that they could structure and create poetry/literary essays of their own. The following tasks helped to explain. . .

Task One: Discussing Love

Friendship groups of 4

LESSON TWO: "Stop All the Clocks" by W.H. Auden

Class discussion: What would you do if the person you loved died? Pupils' reactions were recorded on the board.

Reading the poem

Class performance of the poem

The poem lends itself to a dramatic choral reading, so I split the class in half, and gave each group a tape recorder. Their task was to perform the poem in a way that would draw attention to the different moods of each verse, and emphasise the active words like "Stop".

Analysing the Poem

Task One: Mind Mapping - What is happening to the narrator's world?

A diagram was drawn of all of the external elements that the narrator wanted to control now that his lover was dead. Within the mind, the narrator's feelings/thoughts connected with these external elements were listed, e.g.:

Task Two: Objective Correlative

I explained how traditional language can often be seen as being inadequate in expressing people's feelings about love, e.g. Annie Lennox's song: "No More 'I Love You's / Language is changing outside the words". Thus, we discusses how Auden uses objects to represent feelings within this poem, e.g.:

Physical Object	Idea Represented
Clocks	Time

Task Three: Language and Form

LESSON THREE: Childhood Love

"I am Very Bothered" by Simon Armitage

Task One: Memories of Childhood Love

Task Three: Writing Poetry

Pupils wrote a poem to an old school friend, apologising for something cruel that they had done when they were much younger. The template/characteristics of the original poem were used as a structure.

LESSON FOUR: "I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine" by Liz Lochhead

Task One: Valentine's Day

Class Discussion: Is Valentine's Day an event which gives lovers an opportunity to show their love, or a day that commercialises love and puts people under pressure? From the discussion we established the social messages that are attached to this day.

Task Two: Analysis of the poem

The class listened to the NEAB tape reading of the poem.

Pupils answered the following questions in their exercise books:

Task Three: Gendered Language

Question posed: "How do we know that it is a woman narrating this poem?"

Pupils had to find phrases that were examples of gendered language and discuss how they were gender stereotypes.

Pupils then had to imagine they were an alien who found this poem. They made a list of their observations about men and women from this poem:

Homework:

Imagine you are the person who received this poem. Write a poem in response to this rap attack, using the same template of rhyme and form.

LESSONS FIVE AND SIX: Speaking and Listening Task - Group productions of a tape to help the teaching of two poems

Pupils were put into mixed gender groups of 4. Their task was to create a professional poetry teaching tape that could be used in any Year 10 class to help other pupils understand the poems that had been studied.

Task One:

Pupils had to create an interesting way to read two poems, thinking about the audience and purpose of this resource. The readings of the poems were rehearsed and then recorded on tape.

Task Two:

After each recording, the group had to discuss the poems, using the following pointers to guide them:

All pupils completed a speaking and listening topsheet for this task. As a class we listened to each tape recording, evaluating what was good and what needed improving. Each member of the class received an English certificate for this task.

LESSON SEVEN : Unrequited Love

"The Despairing Lover" William Walsh

Task One:

Pupils were put into mixed ability groups of 4/5. Each group was given an envelope full of parts of the poem. They opened the envelope and worked out how to reconstruct this poem using their knowledge about poetic conventions and content.
(20 mins)

Task Two:

Pupils were given a copy of the poem stuck on sugar paper. Pupils were given 3 - 5 mins to discuss and write down 5 methods that they used to reconstruct the poem. How did they do it? Feedback.

Task Three:

I read the poem to the class. Members of the class read the poem - each pupil saying one line.

Task Four:

In 3 ability groups, pupils worked on enlarged versions of the poem, to investigate:

Task Five:

Each group fed back to the whole class: everyone taking notes from the board.
Reflection on what had been learnt.

Task Six:

The poem was played from the NEAB tape.

LESSON EIGHT : Poetry is like Science - "Even Tho" by Grace Nicholls

One of the most exciting aspects of Nicholls' poem is the way that fruit imagery is used to represent the female narrator's feelings for her lover. As the fruit was quite exotic, I decided to buy avocados, starapples, plums, watermelon, bananas from the local supermarket and conduct a dissection and observation of their different qualities.

Task One: Investigating why Nicholl's using fruit to represent love

In friendship groups, pupils were given an example of each of the fruits used in the poem. They were instructed to dissect each piece of fruit, and fill in a chart that would collect their observations:

Type of Fruit	Colour	Shape	Skin Texture	Inner Texture

Task Two: Relating fruit characteristics to love

Task Four: View of Love

In pairs, pupils discussed and wrote about the version of love that Nicholls is advocating: Independent Love "And keep to de motion/ of we own person/ality."

LESSON NINE, TEN AND ELEVEN : Writing a Comparative Poetry Essay

This was the first GCSE literature essay that the pupils had ever done, therefore I gave them an essay structure to work from. The basis of the framework, was that in an exam situation, their essays should have an introduction, five points and a conclusion. Each paragraph should have the following structure: Assertion (point); Quotation; Analysis; Evaluation.

ESSAY PLAN

Question: "How is Love Represented in Two of the Poems You Have Studied?"

Introduction:

Point One : What view of love is being expressed in the poems?

Point Two : How are the lovers described?

Point Three : What are the images of love within these poems?

Point Four : How is language and form used to express feelings about love?

Point Five : What are the poets trying to say about love?

Conclusion: