Unseen Poetry - Establishing Content!

This engaging and interesting lesson enables students to develop the knowledge and skills needed to establish the content (e.g. the subject matter, poet’s key messages, and surface/ deeper meanings) of previously unseen poems. In particular, they define and understand each of the key features of content, practice identifying them in poems and analyse their effectiveness upon the reader.

The lesson utilises a range of tasks, that require students to be both independent and collaborative learners. It follows this learning journey:

-Defining and exemplifying each of the features of content through a group card-sorting activity;
-Discussing , understanding, and practicing some of the skills and techniques needed to initially explore a poem for content;
-Considering the ideas of interpretation, inference, surface/deeper meaning, and textual evidence as important mechanisms for exploration;
-Applying their understanding of the features of content and the skills needed to find them through a jigsaw activity;
-Self-evaluating their own learning in the lesson.

Included in this resource pack are:
-A well-presented, thorough, and informative, whole-lesson PowerPoint presentation;
-Content features cards for the card-sorting activity;
-‘Establishing Content’ worksheet for the development task;
-Copies of the poems ‘Two Scavengers in a Truck…’ by Laurence Ferlinghetti, ‘Nothing’s Changed’ by Tatamkhulu Afrika, ‘Hitcher’ by Simon Armitage and 'Island Man’ by Grace Nichols for annotation (both freely available online);
-A comprehensive teacher guidance form/lesson plan to assist delivery.

Resources are provided in both Word (for easy editing - find in the zip file)and PDF (to prevent formatting issues between computers).
All images in this resource are licensed for commercial use, and are cited on the final slide of the lesson presentation.