Celebrating poetry: with the CLiPPA and in the classroom


Poetry is a wonderful medium for engaging children in reading and writing, however it can often be overlooked in favour of more traditional stories or non- fiction in classrooms, bookshops and in the home.


At the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, says Charlotte Hacking, we are proud to be the National Poetry Centre for Primary Schools, and our Centre for Literacy in Primary Poetry Award (CLiPPA) is the only national award to showcase poetry published for children. This year’s shortlist celebrates a broad spectrum of what poetry is and what it can do for children.


Zim Zam Zoom! by James Carter, illustrated by Nicola Colton (Otter Barry Books) is a wonderful example of the joy of early play with rhyme and song. These are the foundations of a quality early reading experience. Joining in with nursery rhymes, jingles and songs are often children’s first way in to connecting spoken words to print on the page.


Listening to poems read aloud and re-read, allows them to savour and try out parts of the language before joining in and performing themselves as the language becomes more familiar, such as in the use of onomatopoeia in Firework Poem.


The musicality of poems such as the title poem Zim Zam Zoom! and the get up and go poem Splish! Splash! Splosh! invite children to join in with choral performances and use their whole bodies to engage in the action on the page. Children can also learn, through poems such as Hullabaloo, where ‘The cow goes Meow’ and ‘The mouse goes Moo’, that language is to be experimented and played with, and that poetry is fun!


Michael Rosen is a master of language and word play. His collection Jelly Boots and Smelly Boots,


illustrated by David Tazzyman


(Bloomsbury) contains rhymes and laughs aplenty. Word play becomes more sophisticated with the witty Imagine and Birdsong exploring homographs and their meanings and To, which explores words within words and homophones in a tongue twisting tangle.


The poems speak to children directly, encouraging deeper


engagement and response. Subjects such as school in Question Mark and The School Trip and family in Dad, In Bed and My Brother, relate to children’s immediate and prior experience, which allows them to make personal connections with poems. Engaging children in book talk1


around poems helps them to respond more deeply. Ask


children to share their likes and dislikes, ask questions and think about personal connections or familiar experiences that relate to what they have heard. You may then focus on discussing words or phrases that are particularly vivid or memorable or the effect of devices like repetition and rhyme.


The collection also draws attention to the importance of words. We are told in Words that ‘words are presents that we give to each other’ and poems such as The STOP Button, Metroland and Metal Covers on the Pavement remind us that words are all around us for us to make our own meaning from. The collection also contains a wealth of narrative poetry. Poems such as The Dam on the Beach, Robots and The People place the thought of writing about experiences, happy, sad and familial as an important activity.


Kate Wakeling’s debut collection Moon Juice, illustrated by Elina Braslina (The Emma Press) is a wonderful exploration of poetry across a range of forms. As children’s reading of poetry develops, they should be encouraged to re-read and look at poems in different ways. Multiple readings will help young readers explore the ideas and feelings at the heart of a poem.


Encourage children to read poems aloud to hear their sounds and musicality. The lyricism of poems like Hamster Man and Dodo revisit the musicality of poetry and children may be inspired to explore the rhythm and rhyme of such poems by performing to beats and music. They may even be inspired to write lyrics of their own.


They should also look at the way the poem is laid out on the page; the white spaces, the shapes it makes and what this adds to our understanding of the ideas or feelings within the poem or the way it could be performed. The wonderful ode to the Telescope, for example, celebrates the form of the object throughout its presentation.


The collection also challenges children to look at what defines poetry. The brilliant Hair Piece looks like a narrative recount on the page but


1 From Tell Me: Children Reading and Talk and The Reading Environment (Thimble Press, 2011) 4 Books for Keeps No.224 May 2017


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