Poems performed by school children

School children performed their own poems to an invited audience of parents, carers and friends at Square Chapel Centre for the Arts at the culmination of a literacy project.

Pupils from St Mary’s Catholic Primary School and Beech Hill Primary School had been working with local poets Winston Plowes and Keith Hutson since January when they became poets in residence at the schools, working with more than 100 year five and year six children.

The children explored all different kinds of poetry and had lots of had fun writing their own compositions.

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Some of the children even wrote poems in their first language, including Czech, Urdu and Hungarian.

The poems they created were showcased at a special performance last month, which featured a diverse range of writing, including kennings, a two word phrase describing an object often using a metaphor, and haikus, a traditional form of Japanese poetry consisting of three lines.

The PoetryQuest project is currently in its second year and was delivered by Square Chapel’s community outreach team in partnership with Children and the Arts and aims to increase awareness, access and knowledge around poetry.

Natalia Buckley, a teacher at Beech Hill Primary School, said: “The children were extremely enthusiastic and constantly engaged. They looked forward to the workshops every week. The poems that they produced were brilliant – at a level that I really couldn’t have got from them. I hope we get to work with Winston again.”