Poetry with very young writers - the best fun.

Two schools today, to work with year 1 and 2 children, as part of the outreach for the Cardiff Children's Literature Festival. We were writing poetry, and using the great animal cartoons of Huw Aaron as a starting point.

 First, in Roath Park Primary, where we wrote about a pelican balancing a book on its beak, and other things too. A lot of alliteration followed.

I liked the above example because the pelican has a bendy boomerang, a slithering snake and a kicking kangaroo on its beak, and when the pelican sneezes, they slide off into the stars. I also like it because somewhere in the creative process the young poet obviously needed an energy boost and so took a big bite out of the top of the page!

Here are the children all holding their poems triumphantly aloft,

 This afternoon, to Herbert Thompson Infants, to write about a monkey eating lots of fruit and vegetables to help him with his reading,

This poem is great as it includes two languages! The monkey has a big green lettuce to help him read, and a juicy coch strawberry to help him be strong.

I asked the children to think what book the monkey might be reading, and they made up some titles, and put some illustrations on the pages of the book. The poem above had the monkey reading The Banana Book. In the picture below, the young writer had put some text, which I really liked.

 It is wonderful to see the very young writing poetry, putting their own imaginations and ideas into the frame I provide to produce very individual work. There really is nothing better! A selection of the poems produced today are going to be in an exhibition in Cardiff Central Library in April, and I am going to enjoy seeing the children's work again.

Many thanks to Louise Richards of Literature Wales who arranged the day and came to help with the poetry writing, and to the staff at both schools, who joined in with such enthusiasm and helped the young writers to produce great work.

The festival website is here http://www.cardiff.gov.uk/content.asp?nav=2,2869,6584
and Huw Aaron's website is here www.huwaaron.com