Poetry Shuffle Teachit KS3 Interactive Pack updates 2008
Routes through the pack

The Year 9 route

What’s the point?

Year 9 students often don’t encounter much poetry. Perhaps that’s because poetry hasn’t been seen on the National Curriculum Test for some time (although that doesn’t mean that it won’t ever reappear) and perhaps because there’s so much of it at GCSE that we sometimes think they need a break in anticipation. Yet Year 9 can be a really good time to introduce students to some more challenging poems, and get them exploring texts more analytically – a valuable bridge between Year 8 and GCSE. This route through takes as its focus RAF 5 –Explain and comment on writer’s use of language including grammatical and literary features at word and sentence level, and RAF 6 –Identify and comment on the writer’s purpose and view points and the overall effect of the text on the reader.

What are the poems?

Poems / Poem page / Lesson plan page
Sonnet 130, William Shakespeare / 8 / 3
The Eve of St Agnes, John Keats / 78 / 85
A Poison Tree, William Blake / Update
The Jaguar, Ted Hughes / 141 / 136
Mid-Term Break, Seamus Heaney / 150 / 147
London Breed, Benjamin Zephaniah / 214 / 211
Valentine, Carol Ann Duffy / 251 / 248

What’s the plan?

The introduction from ‘A Poison Tree’ makes a lovely simple task for showing students how the words writers choose have an impact on a reader. Make sure that they understand that the simple rhyme scheme helps the poet to get his message across, et voila … you have made a good start to the work.

Move on to the lesson on ‘Sonnet 130’, looking at the way in which the conceit has been used. Ask them to choose the image that they think is most striking and explain why. It then makes sense to move on to Valentine which is a much more modern take on the theme of love. Again, the lesson plan works perfectly … to extend the work, take the first ‘suggestion for writing’ and extend it into a comparison of the two poems studied so far.

Taking a slightly different view of love is ‘London Breed’. Start the lesson off by asking them what they love (and be prepared for a) some odd answers and b) a demand that you share yours) and then, technology permitting, play them the poem. The development section of the lesson is excellent for training them for exam technique – the sooner they get into the habit of annotating as they go, the better it will be. And the visual will certainly help them to make sense of the poem and its meaning. You could even then extend the comparison task above further, to include this poem, if you feel like really giving the students a bit of brain stretch.

Start with the Hughes and Hunt images of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ask the students to explain what they can see. Then ask them to take the viewpoint of one of the characters in the painting and say what they can see. Get them to think about why there might be differences. Expand the second plenary into a more developed writing task, asking students to find evidence from the text for each of the points.

The lovely thing about ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘Mid-Term Break’is that the lessons really allow the students to get creative; this hands-on approach enables them to see, first hand, the effect of viewpoint on a reader. It’s worth spending some time on the storyboarding activities, and making absolutely certain that they clearly articulate the choices that they’ve made (maybe even getting them to write a detailed commentary) so that they hit the Assessment Focus. The plenary activity for ‘The Jaguar’can also be developed so that they are picking out evidence for the points that they make, and formulating their answers in terms of PEE. At the end of ‘Mid-Term Break’, you could ask the students to explore the choice of words Heaney uses – the shift from ‘the corpse’ to ‘A four foot box, a foot for every year’ is a particularly interesting and moving choice.

And there you have it … a series of lessons which will engage Year 9 students and help them to develop their thinking about the whys and wherefores of texts.

Teachit KS3 Interactive Pack © HarperCollins Publishers and Teachit (UK) Ltd 2008. This page may be photocopied for use in the classroom