World War I poetry teaching pack

World War One inspired the war poets to respond to the horrors and brutalities of war in new ways, writing some of the most vivid, profound and powerful poetry in English Literature. Help your year 7, 8 and 9 students to appreciate their sacrifices with this thoughtful and engaging scheme of learning.

This student-facing pack includes 8 lessons with a range of classroom resources and activities to develop students’ understanding and appreciation of poetic form, structure and style, while building their core reading, writing, comprehension, vocabulary and oracy skills.

What’s included?

Each lesson includes starter activities, followed by 5-6 main activities, and an extension or homework task, with answers for self- or peer marking in class. There are 8 PowerPoint presentations to help you to deliver each lesson, and a summative assessment with an accompanying PowerPoint to review and check students’ progress and learning.

Activities in this scheme of learning include:

• scaffolded writing tasks to develop students’ analytical writing skills
• comparative tasks looking at two poems and approaches to tackling unseen poems
• comprehension questions to check students’ understanding
• discussion tasks, reading aloud and performance ideas to build oral skills and reading confidence
• word decoding tasks, glossaries and word banks to build students’ vocabulary
• formative assessment tasks and low-stakes quizzes.

There are also carefully scaffolded and differentiated poetry analysis tasks to help students understand how to use World War I poetry quotes in their written work.

The pack aims to bring the context of the poems to life, with a range of historic texts including propaganda posters, soldiers’ diaries and letters sent home, as well as facts about the Great War.

There are 13 famous World War I poems to explore, including ‘The Troop Ship’ by Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Futility’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by Wilfred Owen, ‘First Time In’ by Ivor Gurney, John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’, ‘Owl’ by Edward Thomas and ‘Recruiting’ by E.A Mackintosh, as well as poems by Henry Smalley Sarson. Women’s poetry from World War I is also recognised, including ‘The Gift of India’ by Sarojini Naidu, ‘Who’s for the Game?’ by Jessie Pope, May Wedderburn Cannan’s ‘August 1914’ and Sara Teasdale’s ‘Spring in War-Time’.

Taking a thematic approach to war poetry throughout the lessons, students will consider the start of the war, propaganda, recruitment and the call-up, before exploring life at the front, the horror of war in the trenches and the camaraderie between soldiers who served on the frontlines. There is also a focus on women’s lives on the home front and a lesson on the significant contribution of British Empire soldiers, looking at Caribbean, Indian and black British recruits.

This 78-page teaching pack includes everything you need to explore the context, power and impact of World War I poetry with KS3 English Literature students.