Linked into our ‘rainforest’ topic, I decided to use the poem ‘Over in the Jungle’ by Marianne Berkes. If you haven’t seen this book, you really must check it out. The illustrations are out of this world!
The poem is a counting poem so we decided we would write our own versions to then present to the Reception class.
After performing the original poem and looking into its structure, we were ready to brainstorm some rhyming words!
I divided the class into 3 ‘teams’ of ten and gave each team member a number from 1-10. (I gave the trickier rhymes to children I thought were up for the challenge!) Anyone who finished early improved their poem to ensure it mimicked the original exactly and then wrote stanzas for different numbers.
The poems were brilliant! Everyone then joined up with their teams so that as a class we had 3 complete counting poems to perform to Reception.
We checked out some performances of poetry online and tried to make a toolkit of techniques we could use when we performed our poems.
What do you think of our fabulous work?
The Anatomy of Teaching 