A Day at the Seaside
Oh the salty, shimmering deep blue sea!
The sun blazes down on rainbow deckchairs,
crispy golden sand and fluffy towels.
Water is cold as ice for paddling.
Out on the wonderful big waves, a boat,
whose sailors never came back. Was it
a water tornado, a kraken or a megalodon?
Others go fishing, crabbing or exploring caves.
In the woods, it’s time for lunch and games.
Fairies fly sandwiches in. Vampires hide from light.
We play hide and seek, build dens but the Monkeysquirrel
wins the tree-climbing contest. Watch out for the Minotaur!
Before home, it’s to the pier for souvenirs.
Underneath it swims the Loch Ness Monster.
We go on the dodgems with the griffin,
then eat ice-cream and doughnuts.
It’s out of this world!
The way I write a group poem is to ask the class before playtime to think about what they would like to write a poem about. When they return, I gather the ideas and try to synthesise them. The ideas this time included mythical creatures, school, the seaside, so we decided to do a school trip to the seaside with mythical creatures involved. We decided on four stanzas, so divided the group into four, with a stanza each. Organising it by scenes was my idea. We had spoken about structure.
Each group then came up with ideas and recorded them on a mini whiteboard, with one person acting as scribe. They fed back their ideas to me after we decided on an order.
I then shaped and compressed their ideas into 4 quatrains. I think the result is fun, but more importantly, the pupils learned how to structure, control and shape a poem. They also learned some editing skills.
I must congratulate Weston Point on its marvellous reading and writing culture. There was a display of suprisingly mature poems on World War One, into which a lot of quality preparation had been invested.
The group poem was just one of the activities we enjoyed throughout the day, and the children wrote 3 individual poems.
Cover design of my children’s chapbook, out tomorrow
Angela Topping 
Lovely poem to achieve I’m sure the kids enjoyed creating it and you’ve set them on the road to writing and appreciating poetry