UKS2 Poetry Booklet

One poem per half term for year 5 and 6 children.

The poems have been selected to represent a diverse range of poets as well as a range of poetic techniques.

Poems could be chosen to link to particular units of work. As such, some of the poems listed here for year 5 might be taught in year 6, and vice versa.

Year 5:

1. Caged Bird – Maya Angelou (personification, verses, metaphor, repetition, theme, context, anthropomorphism)
2. Eldorado – Edgar Allan Poe (verses, rhyming couplets, alliteration, structure, archaic language, narrative)
3. From A Railway Carriage – RL Stephenson (narrative, verses, simile, structure rhyming couplets, rhythm, onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition)
4. In Flanders Field – John McCrae (rhyme, alliteration, rhyming couplets, narrative, verses, meter, historic)
5. The Night Is Darkening Round Me – Emily Bronte (rhyme, theme, structure, verses, historic, meter)
6. What is Pink? – Christina Rosetti (rhyme, rhythm, meter, repetition)

Year 6:

1. Be Very Afraid! – Carol Ann Duffy (figurative, repetition, free verse, alliteration, punctuation, humour)
2. I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud – William Wordsworth (rhyme, verses, historic, simile, metaphor, meter)
3. If – Rudyard Kipling (verses, historic, repletion, rhyme, theme)
4. The British – Benjamin Zephaniah (some rhyme, assonance, repetition)
5. Unfolding Bud – Naoshi Koriyama (verses)
6. Where The Mind Is Without Fear – Rabindranath Tagore (alliteration, rhythm, some rhyme)