Poetry – Banton Biggies

Outdoor Learning Day November 2024

The weather outside was frosty, so the Biggies wrapped up well. We also popped in for hot juice and to warm up now and again.

The target for recognition today was “to stay on task” and the pupils were brilliant.

We started off in random pairs working on measure. We measured the length, breadth and height of different structures around the playground. The target was to measure accurately. After we finished we compared results and were almost all within a few centimetres of each other.

After the interval we worked on Art. The idea was to compare different medium. Looking at the bare trees, everyone made some pencil sketches, a charcoal picture and took some photos. The results speak for themselves.

1. The thing I like about the pencil sketch is the way I made the branches and how exactly I made the branches.
2. The thing I like about the charcoal sketch is how I outlined the thing and blended it together to make it look nice.
3. The thing I like about using a pencil to sketch is how easy it is to fix mistakes and how you can shade especially easy.
4. The thing I like about using a charcoal to sketch is that blending is very easy and blending can also be used to make very cool drawings.
5. The difference between pencil and charcoal is that charcoal is on black and can blend easily and pencil is grey and can’t blend together but you can make it lighter or darker shades of grey. I personally prefer charcoal because with blending you can make some beautiful artworks.
Robert

I like my pencil sketch because it looks a lot like the tree is used to draw it.

I like my charcoal sketch because it was my first time using charcoal for art because I have only used charcoal pens not actual sticks of charcoal.

I like using a pencil to draw because you can rub out mistakes when you make when drawing and you can also shade if your doing a black and white drawing because if you do it with only black when doing a black and white drawing it will just be black and white with no shading.

I liked using charcoal because you can smudge it with the drawing but it is really messy and it is like rubbing out because you can make the black lighter if you go to hard.

The difference between the charcoal and the pencil is that charcoal you can’t rub out with a rubber but you have to use your hand or arm to rub out mistakes and it is also smaller than pencils but you can rub out stuff with pencil unlike charcoal.
Jason

I like my pencil sketch, I’m pretty sure it looked quite accurate but I didn’t get all the details. I was quite alright with just doing a little bit of it.
My charcoal sketch was pretty good but I think it was a bit messy. But I quite like how it feels and how smooth it is.
Using a pencil to draw is quite easy and fun, the same goes for charcoal but it is a bit harder. But at least it’s good for shading and smudging in stuff.
I prefer pencil it is way easier but I would pick charcoal for shading stuff.
Chloe

In the afternoon we had a show rehearsal inside and then out for the final hour. The Children revisited their tress and wrote some poems. It was getting colder so we didn’t spend too long on that and finished the day with a game of capture the flag.

Dow’s Wood November

We are trying to visit the woods at least once a month this session for some outdoor learning.

The weather today was drizzle with some windy spells. So it was rain-suits on.

This morning we headed to the woods. We putted on waterproof clothing and went. Leaves were falling down on the way to the woods. Different colours of leaves. When we entered the woods it was muddy, filled with leaves and sticks. We were on a scavenger hunt looking for many different things. We had a list. After a certain point we stopped and had a break. We wrote interesting poems and heard them. They were nice. Near the end we did something about natural disasters. We had to save stick people affected by a flood and make a shelter for them. Then we headed back for lunch and on the way I found a big leaf.
Alexia

It was quite muddy and beautiful leaves where falling on the ground and our faces.
Lexi

A group of children walking along a woodland path.

As we travelled through the paths we had a bit of a scavenger hunt, this was supposed to lead to making some art at the end of the morning but we ran out of time.

Poems of all sorts

Children sitting along at the edge of a wood a wall writing.

We stopped at the big rock pile among the oak trees and talked about different forms of poems. This included a couple of types we had not written before. Then the children found some quiet spots and did some writing.

We gathered back at the rocks and read the poem out as loud as we could over an increasing wind.

Tanka snow
Snow
White soft cold
Falling with the wind
Covering the wild grass
No ears to listen to birds
Tony

Oh! look a crow look! look! What ?what happened CRASH!!!!!!!!
Calum

Look what I found
A fish swimming
I wonder if a cat will find it? MUNCH!!!!!
Noah

The woods – acrostic poem

The woods is a place of beauty
Having fun in all weather sun, rain, snow, rain
Everyone finds one thing to remember about the woods

With friends or family
Old and young
Old and young in joy it
Days go bye and the woods changes
So go to the woods
Juliet

Look what I found poem
Look what I found
a A stick
Moss and shaped
Next to the rocks
I wonder if it will break?
Billie

Look what I found?
A rock
Staying still
Sitting on the grass
Wow! It looks amazing
Xander

Tanka
Leaves
Multicoloured, thin, wavy
Sailing off trees
No eyes to see where they’re going

Look at what I found
Look what I found
Moss
Growing and sitting still
On top of old cranky rocks
Will it ever stop?
Alexia

Look what I found
Moss
Growing and still
On a old tree
Does the tree like it?
Lexi

Some concrete poems written by a child, rock, leaf & squirrel — Concrete Poems Juliet

Stick People in Danger

After the poetry session we had some snacks, being careful with our litter then headed over to School Wood.

We have been learning about Natural Disasters in class, when we got to School Wood we found some tiny stick people who had been flooded out of their homes. The Biggies were challenged to create some shelters the right size. Some of the refugee sticks got together others made solo efforts.

We discussed the features that the class had created to help the sticks have warmth and shelter.

We also built dens for two refugees and we could team up with other people. (The refugees are fake small sticks). Our class built dens for them because a flood hit their homes. We needed to build dens that were flood proof, wind proof, safe, warm and some other things for them. We did all of this in this paragraph because our topic is natural disasters.
Gene

But the thing I liked the most was building houses for the little people also known as refugees who were in a flood. We did it because our topic was natural disasters.
They were made of wood they were also tiny.
We had to build them a house it was hard I had 4 sticks. I also put-put walls on it and added I fire place, a bed, and an umbrella to keep their fire wood dry.
Tony

Autumn Haiku

After reading Write Out: Gathering Sensory Details for Haiku on Kevin’s blog I though we could join in. We are a little late for Write Out which inspired this, on holiday last week.

We watched the video embedded on Kevin’s blog and looked at his classes examples. Then we went out into the playground. A cold breeze and some drizzle did stop the Biggies gathering words. Back inside we polished these a little.

Hand written Haiku
The Crispy Leaves
The Birds are chirping loudly
I'm cold everywhere

nights getting darker
A full moon calls for werewolves
marks hallween's start

September Poems

We have been reading a book called Love that Dog In the book Jack tell of his literacy lessons with Miss Stretchberry. Miss Stretchberry read the class poems and Jack tries to write some. At the start he does not like it. The Book also tells the story of Jack’s dog.

We have learnt about several different types of poem and tried to write our own.

The First type of poem we learnt about was imagist poems. Imagist poems try to make an image with words. We learnt about Lunes. Lunes have very few words, 11 in total, three in the first line, five in the second and three in the third. We wrote kennings, these are like riddles. We tried our hand at sound poems and shape poems.

We also read the Poem The Table by the Turkish poet Edip Cansever and wrote our own version.

Pupils’ Views

I’ve taken some quotes from the classes e-Portfolios where they reflected on the writing.

I liked writing my poems because you can write random words and the don’t have to make sense and you can write some and they can be as long and as short as you want .

When I was writing this poem I was thinking about a ewe lamb sale that I went to about a week ago. I thought I could think about what I brought back with me from the sale and I thought that could write a table poem about and what we got back from it

I enjoyed writing poems because it let me experience and explore different ways of writing and I enjoys how many things there are in this universe to write about but still it’s so hard to pick just one for a poem, I enjoyed how punctuation doesn’t alway need to be in a poem, how poems don’t need to make sense and how poems can be enjoyed by anyone anywhere at anytime!

I was thinking to make a dog poem and the kind of I’m going to was a Kenning I enjoyed making the poem because you learn something all the time.

I liked writing the something poem because it’s a concrete poem, it was really fun to write with all the different ways you can say the word, normal, with a capital letter, backwards, full stops in between, commas, all capitals with just one word. I also enjoyed some lunes that I was writing because it doesn’t take long.

I enjoyed writing poems because you get freedom to write with rhythm and beat and writing stories you can’t do that and poems don’t need to make sense.

I enjoyed writing poems because they don’t need to make sense and you can play about with the words that you are writing. It’s also fun because there are so many different ways to write poetry and you can learn new ways.

I like writing poetry because of the freedom. It doesn’t have to mean anything it could just be The Apple all over again. I like the amount of stuff that you can do it doesn’t has to be a number of words before the next line.

I liked the onomatopoeia in my poem.

I enjoyed writing poems because you could do anything you’d want with it and do things that isn’t real you also do a lot of punctuation and you get your brain moving then if you really like it you could show your teacher and they will like it to. It is really fun to write poems and my class is lucky we get a teacher that likes poems so we do things about poems almost everyday. That is why I enjoy poems.

Playground Poets

These poems were written on a sunny morning in the playground.

We tried to describe what we saw and what was happening as clearly as possible without adjective or adverbs.

playground poems

Continue reading “Playground Poets”

Meet The Biggies 2022

The Biggies spent some time this week writing Bio-Poems,

Click on the Thumbnails below to read them.

Mia

Amy

Primary Six Poets go Down to the Woods

On Thursday the primary sixes for both p6-7 & p4-5-6 went down to the woods.

We were going to do a little Earth Day prep, but also to play games and read and write poems.

It was quite cold to be sitting long so we warmed up with running around game. All the children really all concentrated on writing and drawing in their tiny notebooks.