Vergissmeinnicht - Keith Douglas

This engaging, comprehensive lesson aims to improve students’ understanding of Keith Douglas’ WWII poem ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ with particular focus upon the language, structure, and subject matter used within the poem. By the end of the lesson, students demonstrate their knowledge of the text analytically, through assured, appropriate, and sustained interpretations.

The lesson follows a step-by-step learning journey, in which children learn through:

Knowledge harvesting what they know about World War II, and developing a contextual understanding of Keith Douglas’ experiences in the war;
Reading and interpreting the poem, using a provided line-by-line analysis, and interactive group activities;
Developing their understanding through inferring and analysing key language and structural choices;
Analysing how the themes of suffering and misery are conveyed through Douglas’ language and structure choices;
Self/ Peer assessing each other’s learning attempts.
Included is:

Whole lesson PowerPoint - colourful and substantial; (including a hyperlink to a reading of the video)
Research template;
Copy of poem;
Deeper thinking worksheet;
Analysis template with success criteria for creating well-structured responses;
Comprehensive lesson plan.

All resources are provided as word documents (for easy editing) and PDF documents (to ensure consistency of formatting between computers). There are also opportunities for group learning, peer assessment, and whole class discussion. This was originally taught to middle-ability year 10 and 11 groups, but can easily be differentiated for groups of different ages and abilities.

All images are licensed for commercial use, and image rights are listed on the last page of the presentation.