This idea uses imagery and poetry to explore emotion words (orange cog) in detail. Pupils in this P5 year group had very recently begun Emotion Works learning when this lesson took place. This example shows that even with limited prior teaching, highly engaging and effective emotion learning can take place. 

Australian poet, Rosie Harris, started the poetry lesson with some simple games: they verbally explored similes and metaphors, played Poetry Tennis (Rosie shouted a word and pupils had to “bounce back” rhyming words), and played movement and action games.

The pupils were shown a large image of an erupting volcano. There were asked “What would it feel like to be a volcano?” and invited to act out “being a volcano”. From these activities, a list of descriptive vocabulary was created, including words like smoking, hot, bubbling, steamy, rumbling, angry and furious.

The whole class worked together to create and edit a shared poem on the volcano. The title was “Volcano” and the content was to be as descriptive as possible, using the word bank the class had created. The last line read “When I feel angry, I am a volcano”.

Pupils repeated this task individually, using the poetry word bank to support their writing. There were no rules on how to write the poem. Rhyme was not necessary. When they had finished, pupils were encouraged to up level their emotion word using the emotion words lollipop sticks from the class Emotion Zone. The results were impressive!

In a the second part of this lesson, pupils were shown different images and asked to ascribe an emotion word to each one.

For example:

Popcorn – Excited.

Monsoon – Raging, Angry, Sad, Depressed.

Iceberg – Tense, Cold.

Waterfall – Calm, Happy.

They then wrote poems on their new subjects, with the final line of “When I feel <insert emotion word>, I am a <subject name>.  Again, this produced inspiring results! (See the linked presentation for more examples of this fabulous poetry!)

Thanks to P5 at Currie Primary for sharing their poetry with us!