Tag: alliteration

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The 10 Step Cheat’s Guide to Writing a Poem

I had a panicked phone call from my niece the other day. She’d been off school for a few days, and she’d just had a text from a friend telling her that they had to hand in a poem about sweets the next morning. It was already almost bedtime, so time was short.

Usually when teaching poetry, I’d have a selection available so that we could look at the structure of them, and choose one to use as a framework. There was no time for any of this however, so we had to bluff it. This is how she wrote a poem in 15 minutes…

  1. She chose the sweet she was going to write about – Turkish Delight
  2. She wrote down as many words to describe it as she could: lovely, jelly, pink, yellow, sugary, chocolate, flavours, strawberry, lemon, rose, cubes, sweet, tangy, nice.
  3. She wrote down words to describe what it felt like in her mouth (chewy, like heaven) and how she felt when she ate it (happy)
  4. She used a thesaurus to replace all the boring words (nice became enjoyable, lovely became delicious, happy became joyful)
  5. She grouped together words that started with the same sound (alliteration) so we got “joyful jelly (an example of personification) and “chewy, chocolate-covered cubes”.
  6. She mixed up the senses so that feelings and colours had tastes (tangy yellow)
  7. She was insistent that this poem had to rhyme, even though poetry doesn’t have to, so she chose some words she thought it would be easy to find rhymes for (jelly, rose, sweet, pink) and made a list of all the words she came up with that rhymed. She also looked at her initial list of words to see if there were any rhymes or near rhymes.
  8. She looked at the words she hadn’t used from her initial list, and picked out a couple of her favourites.
  9. She kept moving the groups of words around until she found an order she was happy with.

10. She wrote the final version out in her book in neat.

This is the final poem:

Strawberry-flavoured, joyful jelly
Feels delicious in my belly.
Chocolate-covered cubes of heaven
Sugar-coated, rose and lemon.
Tangy yellow, pink so sweet
Makes an enjoyable evening treat.

Ok, it’s not going to win any literary prizes but it’s not bad for a late-night, ¼ hour Skype video chat.

 

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Beast Quest Comprehension

bqcI’m not a literary snob, really I’m not – I’ll take a ‘thumping good read’ over a ‘short-listed for the Booker prize’ any day. Even so, when I began working with a child who hated reading but who said he was prepared to give the Beast Quest books a go, my heart sank. How on earth was I supposed to find anything of merit in Beast Quest?

The book Daniel* chose was Nixa the Death Bringer from the Avantia series. I decided to work on one chapter per one hour session, so I wrote down 10 questions for each one, which left time to read the chapter at the beginning of the session, and to make a prediction at the end as to what was going to happen in the next chapter. And so, with a sense of despair, I started reading it with a pen in my hand to write down questions.

Well…it surprised me!

Obviously I managed to write some retrieval questions – they were the easy ones. I hadn’t expected to be able to come up with much more than that though.

In fact, I was able to write a whole range from technique (Why did the writer use italics for this section?  What is the purpose of the ellipsis in the 2nd paragraph), to working out the meaning of difficult words (sliver, stifle, pinnacle), and inference (How is the character feeling at the end of this chapter? What makes you think this?)

There were opportunities for Daniel to give and justify opinions (Do you think the title of this chapter was a good one? Why (not)? Do you think the main character made the right decision at the end of this paragraph? Why (not)?) and also to pick out other people’s view points in the text.

There were chances for him to show his understanding by explaining what various pronouns referred to, some of which referred to things in the last or even last but one sentence.

I found examples of alliteration, similes, homonyms….even anthropomorphism!

As Daniel got quicker at answering the questions and at finding the evidence in the text to support his answers, we started to have a few spare minutes at the end of the sessions where we could look at short snippets from other books and even answer a question or two about them. The result? Daniel realised that not all books are boring…he has even started reading for pleasure at home! Last session he proudly told me that the previous evening, instead of spending all his time playing on his Xbox he had read the first 34 pages of Harry Potter.

I’m really glad I took a gamble on basing reading comprehension tuition around Beast Quest instead of just dismissing it out of hand.

* not his real name

For English tuition in the north Birmingham area (Great Barr, Hamstead, Kingstanding, Pheasey, Perry Barr, Streetly) get in touch via my contact page.

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A is also for…Alliteration

The snake slithered slowly.This is when you have two or more words beginning with the same letter: The blue balloons burst with a bang! Sentences like this stand out in your writing and make your teacher think “Wow!”

If possible, make the letter you choose sound like the thing you are writing about. In the sentence “The snake slithered slowly through the grass” the repeated ‘s’ sounds like a snake hissing, so it will make your teacher think “Double Wow!” Be careful though. Only the interesting words count, so if I say “I’m going to Trinidad” the two ts don’t count because “to” isn’t an exciting word.

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