Product reviews for Teaching Poetry in the Primary Classroom

Gervase Phinn has drawn on his experience as a teacher, adviser, school inspector and poet to produce this useful book which provides teachers with an invaluable way of approaching poetry in the primary classroom. He shows teachers how to encourage children to enjoy reading and writing poetry. Phinn believes that poetry should be experienced before it is analysed and that 'close study at an early age' is not the way to encourage enjoyment.

The bulk of the book is made up of chapters covering different kinds of poems and the limericks, clerihews, ballads, acrostic poems, alphabet poems and so on are accompanied by a mass of poems, many of them his own work. The poet is keen to follow through on the way he himself was taught which made 'the pleasure principle paramount'. The book is intended to enable teachers to provide a rich diet of poetry for children. At a time of mounting concern about the way poetry is approached, this helpful book provides an essential handbook for primary schools. No classroom should be without it.