Lit Con 4: Playing with Words
Grow your learners’ fascination with the written word by taking advantage of humanity’s natural attraction to patterns
I recently attended the UKLA/NEU Primary Conference 2024, and for the last few posts I’ve been sharing some of the insights I gathered – both great and questionable…
You can read my overall thoughts in my personal blog. But in this Education section, the topics have been…
Playing with words
The closing keynote was delivered by then-children’s laureate Joseph Coelho, the man for whom the word ‘poetry’ was made to alliterate with ‘passion’…
Playing with Words
Coelho began with the story of his early life, stressing the important roles that teachers and librarians played. For most of his youth, he didn’t consider himself a poet so much as a lover of words.
Along the way, he demonstrated the fun there is to be had playing with words – fun he’s since shared with thousands of children in schools and libraries all over. The thrust of his keynote was to encourage educators to rediscover this fun for themselves, then pass it on to their learners.
The first template he shared was the ‘One Word Poem’. Here, you give your learners a title, then ask them to write a poem of just one word. An example title might be, ‘The Day I Fell Off My Chair’, which could lead to the following:
The Day I Fell Off My Chair
Ouch!
You’ll find more examples of ‘One Word Poems’ in Coelho’s fantastic book How to Write Poems (NB: buy from LoveReading4Kids to send 25% of your payment to benefit school libraries). This book also contains the MORERAPS template, with which he crafted a poem live with the conference audience.
With MORERAPS, you decide on a subject, then use a different poetic technique for each line of an 8-line poem. The techniques are…
Metaphor
Onomatopoeia
Rhyme
Emotion
Repetition
Alliteration
Personification
Simile
At the conference, Coelho suggested the theme ‘teaching’. You can get a sense for how that went down by reading my personal blog – but for now, here’s my personal example…
Teaching
The Sun is there, but hidden behind clouds.
Whoosh!
The teacher, smiling, offers aid,
To learners frowning, not yet swayed…Perseverance.
Smiling! Smiling? Smiling.
The mentor models, maturing modern minds modicum by modicum, minute by minute.
The clouds, unable to resist, part to let the Sun shine through.
For teaching is like the wind: sometimes invisible, yet always there, the means of moving life forward.
Not Convinced?
There’s actually some science behind Coelho’s ‘hacks’ for encouraging your learners to take an interest in words. Neuroscience identifies humanity’s innate love of patterns as apophenia.
Yes, this tendency can lead to neuroses – such as gambling addictions (believing the roulette ball will deliver a certain result after x spins) and superstition (expecting some misfortune on Friday 13th). Some see the slightest hint of a pattern in the randomness of life and rush to conclude the improbable.
But it’s there in all of us. It’s how we remember the journeys we take to our regular destinations, the steps we follow to make our favourite drinks, the clothing combinations that will suit us.
It’s also how language works. We associate certain sounds with meaning, and then associate those sounds with letters. Jenny Davis described something similar to this process in her workshop on supporting SEN learners to read.
In fact, many words developed out of the sounds we make instinctively. Take the example ‘One Word Poem’ above. When pretty much any mammal sustains an injury, they make sounds that are easily loud and sustainable, such as “Aaaahh!” or “Owww!”
Most of us will then also hiss as we try to shut off the pain. The ‘ch’ sound, when drawn out, is such a restrictive hiss.
From this, it’s easy to see how a word like “Ouch!” developed.
The highly insightful Helen from the Happily Ever Teaching podcast* once suggested a brilliant literacy lesson involving this principle: invite your learners to handle various objects, and vocalise a sound to represent how it feels.
As they handle a dry leaf, for example, they may replicate the sound made by rubbing it with their fingers (“fffffff”), or the sound of scrunching it up (“kllkkllkkllk”). They could even vocalise their emotion when handling it – for some children “mmmm”, others maybe “ikkk!”
Then, for plenary, share some of the words that can be used in these contexts, and marvel with them at the similarities. “ffffff” is there in “leaf”; “kllkkllkkllk” is there in “crinkle”; “mmmm” moves into “magnificent”; “ikkk” is there in “sick”.
Finding patterns between words and the sounds they naturally express is an easy way to inject some fun into literacy.
* Sadly the Happily Ever Teaching podcast was discontinued in 2023. However, many of the team behind it went on to produce the story-led knowledge-rich teaching resources you get by joining the Epic Educators club – which you can learn more about by using the button below, and get 25% off if you join using the code LITCON4.
Final Thought
Here’s a final tip for your shared reading – which I would say was Coelho-inspired, but for the fact you’ll also find it in All the Better to Read You With, which was published a few months before this litcon… $;-P
After reading a story with your learners, go back through it and ask them to pause you whenever they hear a word or phrase they like. They don’t have to say why – they don’t even have to know what it means. Let them just enjoy the words for the sounds they produce.
By labelling their highlights as ‘rhyme’, ‘alliteration’, ‘onomatopoeia’ etc after they’ve brought attention to them, the fun comes first – and then you’ll be able to smoothly move to creating some examples yourselves…
How do you nurture the love of sounds and words with your learners? Or do you find your learners don’t ‘fit the pattern’?
Reply to this post with your experience, I’d love to discuss it with you!
Please forward this support to a colleague – they may use it as much, or more, than you.
You’ll then feel the intense satisfaction of knowing you’ve helped even more children reap the rewards of recreational reading. $;-)
Educators: How do you nurture the love of sounds and words with your learners? Or do you find your learners don’t ‘fit the pattern’?