How to use poetry frames in the classroom

Ask an adult to write a poem and they’ll want to know what their objective is. Ask a child and they’ll say: “How long’s it got to be? Does it have to rhyme? How do I start? Is this the right spelling?” All these questions are designed to postpone the moment of putting pen to paper. They are prompted by a fear of failure (the root cause of writers’ block). But this can be overcome. Here’s how.

Warming up

Never begin with just a title. Children, like adults, need the security of recognisable patterns or structures. The simplest of these is the List poem.

I often start with The Treasure Chest (see activity sheet). I invite the children to imagine a Treasure Chest that is bigger on the inside than the outside (a bit like Dr Who’s TARDIS®). I ask them to list all the things they would like to find in it, putting each new thing on a new line. There are no wrong answers. Unlike maths (where 3×4 always equals 12), the chest contains whatever they want it to.

I also (at this stage) gently discourage rhyme. If your first line is ‘A pair of golden scissors’, for example, that’s probably as far as you’re going to get. Go on, how many rhymes for ‘scissors’ can you think of? But if you abandon rhyme so your first line is followed by ‘A dragon roaring’, ‘Harry Potter’s Spell Book’ and ‘A ladder to the moon’, the list will grow and grow.