Context

We are always looking for ways to enhance the curriculum. The group that worked on this project was a bright Year 9 English group and this project was a good way to keep them engaged.

Now there aren’t SATS for Year 9 we felt we had more freedom to take on more creative activities.

Each year we take a group of students to the Arvon Foundation for a week long creative writing course.

We are involved with a non-fiction creative writing initiative with Exeter University.

The library promotes and participates in Birmingham Library Service’s KS3 Book Awards.

Aims & principles

• To provide a creative focus and curriculum enhancement
• To give students the opportunity to consider the impact of words and creativity on their environment
• To develop creative and different approaches to teaching and learning
• To give students an opportunity to write for a purpose

In Practice

Our top Year 9 English group worked with ‘Spoz’ a professional performance poet on our Reading the Signs project.  We discussed the project and what we wanted to achieve and the group decided that we would focus on the library to make a sign that not only had a practical application but also celebrated language and the students’ creative writing.   

Spoz worked with the group and encouraged them to play with language and build poems. Using tools such as ‘Word Bursts’, ‘I’ve Got Rhyming couplets’ and word games such as ‘Rhyming Wars’ the students wrote and performed their own poems.

This session was followed by a visit to the city centre where we looked at signage in a large shopping centre, in the central library and on the streets. We also looked at examples of poems and creative writing in and around the city and we discussed the impact that this had on our environment.

During our final session with Spoz we went back to our school library and working in groups we wrote poems to accompany each department in the library – fiction, humanities, IT etc. These were performed and recorded by the students and incorporated into our sign.

The project took around 2 months to implement during the spring term, each session with Spoz lasted for around 2 hours and our visit to the city centre was a half-day trip. Our Assistant Head Teacher and Librarian were involved in planning the project.   

Outcomes

The project demonstrated how students can effectively work on a focused group activity  

• Students developed speaking and listening skills.
• The project had an impact on students’ confidence.
• The project gave us an opportunity to look at things in different ways and consider text ‘off the page’.
• The project gave us an opportunity to explore different types of poetry, rapping for example, and this is something we will develop and build on.

Legacy

A professionally produced sign for our library that includes our students’ creative writing.

We would like to develop ways of working with different forms of poetry and the spoken word. We would like to think about different ways of presenting text, such as text as sound.

I would have tried to incorporate more examples of text in performance, perhaps at the start of the project we could have listened to some performance poetry from a range of different artists and poetry genres

We perhaps could have had a better vision for the final output at the start of the project but on the other hand it has been good that the project has been student led and that it took shape as it progressed. 

Resources

Staff time - 2 hours planning and admin, 6 hours ‘lesson’ time, Half day external visit. £550 for the design and manufacture of the sign.

Final thought

Time was the only real constraint and I gave up free periods to ensure that the project went smoothly. I would advise other teachers to go for it – it’s worth the additional effort. I’d also say have a sense in your own mind what you want to achieve and think about the possibilities of cross-curricular links.

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