Introduction to WW1 war poetry for Year 7 / Year 8

This is an introduction to war poetry aimed at Year 7 students or low-ability Year 8. The aim of the lesson is to get the students thinking about the human cost of war, in preparation for looking at specific texts in later lessons.

There are several activities, including a sorting task focused on numbers of dead, a sequence of photos to discuss, and a writing task pretending to be a soldier writing a letter home. The activity I found most powerful was the class poem creation, building up their own war poem out of word suggestions. At the start of the lesson the students came up with words like ‘fight’, ‘blood’, ‘cannon’. But when the exercise was repeated at the end they were suggesting words like ‘tired’, ‘homesick’, ‘scared’. They were amazed at their own creation.

The lesson plan gives a brief outline of how to go through the lesson. The ‘What is War’ PPT takes you through the process, and the ‘World War 1 images and music’ PPT (which I found somewhere - maybe on TES) is a separate piece to play through in the main section of the lesson. I suggest using the slideshow mode (f5) so that the music and animations all play automatically.