Hong Kong Budding Poets (English) Award

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Hong Kong Budding Poets (English) Award

• Presented by NET Section
• Co-organised with Gifted Education Section
• EDB
• Secondary Workshop
• 15 17 March 2006

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Objectives

• To encourage the teaching of poetry
• To encourage the use of poetry in teaching
  English
• To introduce a variety of poetic structures and
• devices
• To develop strategies for assisting entrants in
  the Budding Poets (English) Award

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Poetry Discovery Chart

• How to get students writing poetry
• Brainstorm
• What you know already
• What you want to know

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Value of poetry
Fun
Appreciate sounds words and patterns
Spoken expression
Creative writing
Creativity
Integration
Vocabulary
Variety
Confidence
Imagination
Express feeling and opinions
Phonic skills
Language skills
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Poetry and the Curriculum

• In the implementation of the English Language
  Curriculum, the use of a wide range of language
  arts materials(i.e.using English to respond and
  to give expression to real and imaginative
  experience) and to developcreativity.
• English Language Curriculum Guide (P1-S3) p.11

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Some Elements of Poetry

• Harmonic Textures
• A Sense of Form
• Figures of Speech
• Rhythm Meter
• Line Breaks
• Stanza Breaks

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1.Harmonic Textures

• Alliteration dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon
• Assonance dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon
• Consonance bare ruined choirs
• Rhyme dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon

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1. Harmonic Textures

• Activity One
• Look at the poem and definitions
• Use different coloured pens to identify the
• patterns of sound

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1.Harmonic Textures
Notice how these devices work together in the
opening of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"
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2. A Sense of Form

• partly visual its look on the page
• partly auditory patterns of sound
• pre-existing patterns like sonnets
• free verse

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• From a Railway Carriage
• FASTER than fairies, faster than witches,
• Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches
• And charging along like troops in a battle,
• All through the meadows the horses and cattle
• All of the sights of the hill and the plain
  
• Fly as thick as driving rain
• And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
• Painted stations whistle by.

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3. Figures of Speech

• Metaphor, Imagery, Simile
• Time is a river
• Time hangs heavy
• Time is like the breeze

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Theme Winter

• Snowflakes
• Snowflakes spill from heavens hand
• Lovely and chaste like smooth white sand.
• A veil of wonder laced in light
• Falling gently on a winters night.
• (see handout for full poem)
• by Linda A. Copp

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4. Rhythm Meter

• Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
• Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches

Read the two lines aloud (Activity Three) Can
you find the rhythmic pattern?
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Stressed and Unstressed Syllables

• - x x - x - x x
  - x
• Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
• - x x - x - x
  x - x
• Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches

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5. Line Breaks

• Poetry is written in lines
• The poet can select line breaks by
• counting stresses
• counting syllables
• counting feet - iambic pentameter (e.g.5 iambic
  feet per line)
• or by the poets own rules
• free verse

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6. Stanza Breaks

• Stanzas are visual groupings of lines.
• The Poet can use stanzas of any length
• couplets
• tercets
• quatrains
• quintets
• sestets
• octaves
• 14 line poem can be 3 quatrains and a couplet
• or an octave and a sestet

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So what about rhyme?

• The usual design is fine,
• An ending rhyme for every line.
• Half-rhymes are quite acceptable,
• Consider using these as well.
• But sometimes it is so sublime
• Within a line to bind the rhyme
• And flying blind, your rhyme
• will climb.

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Group activity

• Look at the picture on the table
• What theme does that picture suggest to you?
• Brainstorm that theme to develop a vocabulary and
  image bank
• Decide upon the first line
• As a group, draft an 8-line poem, bear in mind
  the elements already discussed
• Ruthlessly revise your draft

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Teaching Poetry

• Use the five senses
• Encourage careful observation of concrete events
  and scenes
• Encourage the use of figurative language
• Make each word count
• Consider using an existing poetry structure to
  create new work

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Some Ideas for Starting

• Play at making similes - the moon is like a
  banana...the moon is like a white smile.
• Repetitive phrases e.g.
• At the end of the rainbow I saw.
• Icicles are like.
• In my magic box I will put . (list things you
  like)

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More ideas for starting students to write

• I am afraid of
• I wish I was..
• Its a secret but..
• I dreamed I saw
• In my pocket.
• What is Yellow?
• AlliterationOne waggly walrustwo toothsome
  tigersfour funny friends...

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Teaching Resources
http//www.education.tas.gov.au/english/ formsof.h
tm http//www.poetryzone.ndirect.co.uk/resource.ht
m http//www.poetryexpress.org
The Learning and Teaching of Poetry (Secondary
1-3) Curriculum Development Institute (2002)
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