Prayer Before Birth by Louis Macneice

This is an English lesson on the poem ‘Prayer Before Birth’ by Louis Macneice.The speaker of the poem is an unborn child asking for assistance in a cruel world which it will soon be born into. It discusses the themes of cruelty, injustice and freedom which can be linked to other poems taught within a unit.

The lesson begins by asking students to decide what advice they would give to a younger sibling about life, based on their own life experiences. This can then open an interesting class discussion.

Students are then introduced to the ‘WPSLOMP’ method of analysing poetry which they can then apply in pairs before colour coding quotes which are examples of positive and negative imagery as well as some more challenging features such as simile, metaphor and repetition. The ideas they pull together for this can then be explored as a class and the slides can be annotated by the teacher on the board and there are also some quotes colour coded as the answers.

Three slides follow this which have pulled individual quotes from the first three stanzas which the class can brainstorm one at a time.

The lesson ends with a chance for students to write independent essay paragraphs with an adaptable success criteria but this can be adapted for your course. Here I have used SQUID (Statement, Quote, Infer, Device/Develop which is similar to PEA). There is then an opportunity to self or peer assess according to the key skills.

As with all my lessons, there are ‘Talk for Writing’ activities and Challenge tasks for more able students.

Attached is:

-A powerpoint with the lesson clearly outlined

• An alternative word search style starter using images to allow student to guess the meanings of harder words
  -The poem with a word bank on it (2 can be printed to an A4 page or 1 to a page)
  -Link to online videos (see ‘Notes’ under slides).
  -An extension task: write a poem giving advice to another about life, using this poem as inspiration.

All images are from Openclipart.org.