Introducing Primary School children to Poetry

Here’s the headline: you don’t have to. They’re already steeped in the stuff!

I’m writing some school events based around Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book at the moment. It’s so exciting choosing poems to share with children about the solar system, whales and dinosaurs. Questions to be debated include: what planets might taste of, how it might feel to meet a Kronosaurus while swimming and whether or not we’d like to be a whale. Children, you see, aren’t scared of poetry.

If you buy Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book from an independent bookshop during November 2021, email me the receipt and your address and I’ll send you a Natural History Museum postcard with personalised message and a signed bookplate.

By the time we leave school, some of us have been rather put off poetry. Actually – confession time, now – I was. Picking it apart and poring over the meanings and structure throughout my education had sucked some of the simple joy out of poetry. I became paralysed by the thought that I must understand every element, rather than just enjoying it. I had to learn to love poetry again.

Primary school children, however, don’t have any of those associations. The earliest things we hear and learn are usually songs and nursery rhymes: from the sun putting his hat on to the little piggies of our toes. We often read rhyming books with our children: my five year old is word perfect on everything from There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly to Room on the Broom, and woe betide me if I try to skip a verse to get to bedtime quicker! Children are at home in rhyme and verse before they learn to talk, so they don’t have any of the associations some adults have of poetry being fancy, or intimidating, or difficult.

So, my advice on sharing poetry with young children is just to get started! I love Lewis Carroll’s inventive and whimsical poems and I’ve read both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, illustrated beautifully by Chris Riddell, to my five and eight year olds this year. Even though today’s children won’t be familiar with the Victorian rhymes many of them parody (though they might enjoy Mary Howitt’s ‘The Spider and the Fly’, which is one of them) the nonsense and fun of ‘The Lobster Quadrille’ or ‘You Are Old, Father William’ will tickle them. Who can walk anywhere with dawdling children without invoking the lines:

“Will you walk a little faster”, said a whiting to a snail?

There’s a porpoise close behind me and he’s treading on my tail…

Edward Lear’s poems are wonderful too. Ask them to draw the Jumblies in their sea-faring sieve or the Pobble who has no toes, and watch their imaginations soar. For a modern dose of balderdash, Michael Rosen’s Book of Nonsense is great fun.

Poems can help little people tackle big feelings, too. ‘Grandma and the Sea’ in Kate Wakeling’s excellent new collection Cloud Soup will help children to process grief and loss. (It moved me to tears too, so I guess not just children!) Encouraging children to write themselves is a fantastic way to help them express themselves and examine their own emotions. They might be inspired by reading the work of other children, like Take Off Your Brave, a lovely collection of impressive and expressive poems by 4 year old Nadim.

Reading poems aloud, in as dramatic and over the top a way as possible, is a brilliant way to bring them to life to children. My daughter loves A A Milne’s ‘Disobedience’ with its rapid, building rhythm and repetition of ‘James James Morrison Morrison William George Dupree’. If you feel they’ll respond well to a touch of goriness, Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children will appeal – try Jim, who was eaten by a lion. Poet Matt Goodfellow – a former Primary School teacher himself – has a wonderful collection of poems to read aloud called Caterpillar Cake (yum!). If you’re not confident about your own performances, you can find poets reading their own work out loud online to bring it to life for children. I love Laura Mucha’s readings from Dear Ugly Sisters here.

Researching She Is Fierce I came across some wonderful, lesser known poems by women that even young children will – I hope – enjoy as much as I did. Liz Lochhead’s ‘A Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme for Molly’, and Katherine Mansfield’s playful ‘When I Was A Bird’ are bound to delight younger readers. For slightly older children, the chatty, encouraging tone of ‘God Says Yes to Me’ by Kaylin Haught will appeal. Jan Dean’s ‘Three Good Things’ could inspire a discussion about the three best things to choose from their day. Jean Little’s ‘Today’ – like the poems in Allan Ahlberg’s much-loved Please Mrs Butler – speaks directly to the experience of school-children, and they will be delighted to find themselves reflected there – and with the poem’s rebelliousness.

And Wonder has opened the door to a world of nature poems on every subject from volcanoes to otters, dinosaurs to dodos, meteorites to trees. I’m very excited to introduce this book to children and am planning to schedule both live and online events throughout 2022. If you know a Primary School who would welcome one, do email me.

Poetry to inspire future planet-champions

One of the great pleasures of poetry is that the poets’ dazzling feats of imagination can whisk the reader under the sea, to another planet or to view the world from another perspective in the space of just a few lines. When I was choosing poems for Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, I looked for verses that would help me see the natural world in a new way, as many of the museum’s amazing exhibits do. I hoped this shift in viewpoint would encourage children to connect more deeply with the natural world, and encourage a passion for protecting it.

The narrator of a poem can be anyone – or anything: a child, an astronaut, Charles Darwin’s wife, a duck, a dinosaur, a dodo. Children are used to suspending disbelief for the space of a poem, since we have all gorged on a diet of talking animals and magical happenings, often in rhyme, since the days when we were first read to. A poem is a portal the poet asks us to walk through, and on the other side, nothing looks quite the same.

One of the poems I’m most looking forward to sharing with young readers is Gita Ralleigh’s ‘Solar System Candy’.

If I ate the solar system,

the moon would taste

strange and dusty

as Turkish Delight.

Planets would be

giant gobstoppers,

except Saturn and Jupiter –

those gas giants

fizz like sherbert,

or melt like candy floss

in your mouth.

The meteor belt

pops and crackles

like space dust.

Comets leave a minty sting

on your tongue.

Black holes taste of cola bottles.

Or memories

you once had

and lost.

Gita’s poem is full of sensory delights that help readers of all ages to see these distant astral bodies with fresh eyes as they recall familiar tastes and sensations. I had never managed to remember which planets were made of gas, but now they taste like candy floss on my tongue, I’ll never forget! The image of Turkish Delight is perfectly chosen, reminding us of the fact that the moon’s surface is dusty enough for us to leave boot prints in it if we could walk around on it.

John Clare’s poem ‘The Ants’ starts with a human-sized perspective. We see the ants’ procession from our usual lofty height. But with the suggestion of a whispered language among the workers, suddenly the reader is urged to swoop down to eavesdrop, and to imagine the customs and commands that govern the intricately-ordered community.

What wonder strikes the curious, while he views

The black ant’s city, by a rotten tree,

Or woodland bank! In ignorance we muse:

Pausing, annoy’d, – we know not what we see,

Such government and thought there seem to be;

Some looking on, and urging some to toil,

Dragging their loads of bent-stalks slavishly:

And what’s more wonderful, when big loads foil

One ant or two to carry, quickly then

A swarm flock round to help their fellow-men.

Surely they speak a language whisperingly,

Too fine for us to hear; and sure their ways

Prove they have kings and laws, and that they be

Deformed remnants of the Fairy-days.

Some of the poems explicitly ask the reader to think themselves into the mind of a seal, or a tree, or a lizard. It’s a wonderful way to ignite children’s imaginations: who hasn’t wondered where the cat goes at night, or what an elephant might dream about? Geoffrey Dearmer’s poem ‘Whale’ – with its lovely lulling ‘rise and sink and rise and sink’ putting the reader right there in the waves – is a great example. (It will strike a chord with any parent who’s had to negotiate a child into the bath and then coax them out, too!)

Wouldn’t you like to be a whale

And sail serenely by—

An eighty-foot whale from your tip to your tail

And a tiny, briny eye?

Wouldn’t you like to wallow

Where nobody says ‘Come out!’?

Wouldn’t you love to swallow

And blow all the brine about?

Wouldn’t you like to be always clean

But never have to wash, I mean,

And wouldn’t you love to spout—

O yes, just think—

A feather of spray as you sail away,

And rise and sink and rise and sink,

And blow all the brine about?

Asking children to fire up their imaginations by reading – and writing – their way into fresh ways of seeing the natural world can foster a connection with the wonders of our planet. Hopefully, it will also inspire the next generation develop a lifelong interest in protecting it.

I’m looking forward to going into Primary Schools with an interactive talk about poetry of the natural world, asking children to imagine what planets would taste of and how it feels to be a whale, or meet a dinosaur. If you know a school that might welcome a visit, either in person or online, please do get in touch.

A version of this blog first appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit website.

Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book is out now, available from your local bookshop and Bookshop.org among other outlets.

An insider's view of book publicity for writing groups

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking to a writers’ group run by my friend and former colleague Jen Feroze about publicity in publishing. (Things being as they are, I got to do this from my own house, wearing tracksuit bottoms. Will we ever consent to a non-elasticated waist again? I think not.) It’s a privilege to work in such a creative field and it was fun to reminisce about dressing my colleagues up as zombies, carting slowly defrosting grouse carcasses to Crewe on a boiling hot train, taking Sir Roger Moore on three publicity tours and other, less dramatic, tasks I have undertaken in the course of my career.

I spoke about the role of Publicity in the acquisitions process and what the Publicity department will be looking for when a submission is put forward at a publishing house. We moved on to what your publicist will do, and how you can help promote your own books - both working with your publicist and independently. Having been an author and a publicist, I have the unusual privilege of having been both sides of the fence. And I answered a lot of considered and probing questions.

I love working as a book publicist, and I love talking, so I really love talking about my job.

If you’d like me to speak to your writing group via Skype or Zoom, please do get in touch. I have almost twenty years of experience (child labour laws were lax in the early 2000s) in publicity within trade publishing, across big corporates, small indies and as a freelancer, and over ten years’ experience as a published author. I’ve been lucky enough to work across literary and commercial fiction and non-fiction, memoirs, celebrity books, humour, children’s books, poetry, activity books, cookery, gardening, health, lifestyle, business books… all the books, really.

I have to emphasise that I will be wearing tracksuit bottoms throughout, but if that’s not an issue for you, do get in touch for details of fees.