poetry - Tailor-Made Teaching

Tag Archive for: poetry

Performance: Humanizing the Classroom

in Poetry, Presentations, Pronunciation, Teaching

On this course with Adrian Underhill we are preparing a poetry festival for the last class. Each day we start each session with a poem read by Adrian or another student.

I confess when I first read this on the course description I was a little wary. I love poetry but was unsure about its place in the classroom. It appeared to me perhaps as a bit of a throwback to those 70s EFL texts I was so obsessed with when I started out as an idealistic 19 year old – Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrim’s, NLP in the classroom etc. All these years on I guess I’ve become more cynical and jaded.

Why rhyme?

in Language Play, Poetry, Vocabulary acquisition, Word creation

My daughter, Lyra, is learning a poem for a school poetry competition. She wanders around the house muttering lines and rhymes to herself, making up new ones when she forgets the original (which she often does).

Listening to Lyra’s evident enjoyment of the poem I began to wonder what it is about rhyme that we find so appealing.