Hello and welcome to Teacher Tuesday. My goal is to post here every Tuesday with classroom ideas for Australian teachers (and teachers further abroad) but last week I didn’t post because it was one of the busiest weeks of my work year. It was the first week of semester at Curtin university where I work, and I also spent part of the week running writing masterclasses for the Literature Centre in their Talented Young Writers Program.

One of the most delightful things about being a writer is getting to meet and share young readers and writers and ,hopefully ,inspire them on their way to becoming master writers, or just better writers, so I thought this week I would share a version of what I did as part of those sessions last week. I found a really beautiful way to finish each of these extended writing workshops.

During the day we  examined the basic tools of a poet: things like simile, metaphor, and onomatopoeia as well as more nuanced tools such as using rhythm and pace even when you’re writing free verse, or layering meaning and connecting with character and place in poetic form. Then at the end of each day I that I wanted to bring all that together and I asked the students to make me cry. What I mean by this is I asked them to write a sad poem.

So what I’m sharing here today is a shortened form of that exercise. Firstly, as I said, we’d covered a lot of poetic techniques before I asked them to do this so if you were doing this in your classroom I would suggest that you would really need to unpack the mentor texts I’m going to suggest or that you already have been working a lot with poetry and therefore are confident that your students will connect either with the mentor texts or with your instructions but I also think this is an exercise that can stand alone.

This exercise is suitable for upper primary right through to secondary and it’s also suitable for adult writers. Firstly, start with actually sharing some examples of sad poetry. The two examples that I’m recommending are firstly from Pearl Verses the World the scene that goes from page 44 to page 49. If you don’t know the book this is a really intense piece of news that Pearl is receiving and it also is quite sad. When you read that text to your readers you can emphasise the way that there’s not a lot of mention of crying, there is use of repetition and other poetic techniques, but there’s also touches of humour in the lead up to that news being delivered as well as a sense of foreboding that, although it’s humorous, something’s about to happen.

Next, read the second text – from Toppling. Again in this scene John is receiving bad news – you can see there’s a theme here. The pages for this exercise are page 59 to page 63 .

If students haven’t read the rest of the either of these texts I would suggest that you decide exactly where to start and finish, but if they’ve already read the book in class, those are the pages that I recommend. You could do this exercise using other sad poems or sad text extracts you’re more familiar with. I recommend using more than one mentor text to encourage students to look at the differences as well as the similarities.

After you’ve read both passages and you’ve discussed them, the next thing is that you want your students to write. The prompt that I gave to the young these writers was that I wanted them to write me a sad poem and make me cry, and I felt quite confident with doing that because I knew that these students would get what I was talking about having worked directly with me for several hours. I then gave them a choice of two topics:
1. Write a poem about something sad.
2. Write a poem about someone receiving bad news.

I have chosen these because these particular scenes from my two books are both a combination of something quite sad but also in both cases the child in the book is receiving bad news.

Giving young writers a choice that if they actually don’t want to explore something really terrible, the bad news could be a bit flippant. It could be for example someone being told that the Dockers had lost a football game, but I would encourage them to really explore emotion.

One danger in asking children to write a sad poem is that they may just write using lots of ‘sad’ words – crying, tears, sorrow, I feel sad, I was sad and so on. So I really believe in modelling writing either before they write or while they write. As s an educator as well as an author when I ask writers to do an activity I usually also do the same activity on a whiteboard so that they can see my process but also so they have an extra model. I don’t make that example a perfect example, instead I write it on the spot.

I thought I might share with you these three examples (pictured – click on them to make them larger) which are three different sad poems that I wrote on three different days For context I did also afterwards share some of the back story on the frangipani poem because I felt that the missing piece of that puzzle was that why I was so sad wasn’t just about the tree – it was also that that tree marked the burial spot of my previous dog. And the Mundy poem is about David Mundy’s last game. I started by thin

king that I’d write something a bit light hearted by calling it Mundy Mourning with a play on words but actually it ended up bringing me back to what happened at his last game. I surprised myself because I knew I’d feel sad because I’m a Dockers fan. I knew I might cry but when the game finished I cried so much that I almost needed help to leave and that was because it made me think about the fact that my sister who passed away a few years ago loved Mundy as a football player, would have loved to have been there. She would have been cheering and clapping and maybe crying a little bit to see him leave. But she wasn’t there and so when I cried I cried for his last game and then I cried with grief for my sister.

So I’m sharing these poems as examples but I’m happy for you to use one or more of them as mentor texts although I don’t know whether they stand alone without either a tiny bit of backstory or with those other richer texts that

I’ve recommended in Toppling or Pearl Verses the World. They are actually unedited examples of what I wrote on the spot .

SO after the mentor texts and examples simply hand the task over and ask students to write. You can see there is not a lot of structure because I like to trust writers to take the exercise in their own direction, but I also roam and help where needed, especially in a mixed ability group, where more scaffolding might be needed by some students. You know your students, and the amount of support they need, best.

Lastly, if you don’t know about the amazing work of the The Literature Centre in Fremantle, formerly called the Children’s Literature centre or just called the Lit Centre, their Young Writers Programs  run from Year 6 all the way through the year 12, some of the most amazing writing offerings for young writers that I’m aware of ,and well worth taking your young writers along to if you have the opportunity.

Thanks for reading, thanks for teaching our next generation, and I would love to hear if this exercise is useful for you. Maybe you could use it to inspire some of your students to enter the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Contest, which is now open to entries – details here.

See you next Tuesday.