The Magic Box: Poems For Children

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Free verse poetry is poetry without many of its usual rigours, which opens up the doors for lots of creative possibilities. That being said, it might feel a bit daunting for some budding writers when they have no form to follow, so we’ve come up with some lovely resources to make free verse poetry at KS2 a bit more fun and accessible! The initial written task is to compose 3 verses based on the model - learners concentrate on feelings, creatures, the natural world - What would they put in their box?

Kit uses rhythm and rhyme as well as assonance and alliteration to create poems that sound pleasing to the ear. Some use repetition and refrain and sound almost like a song. Some are quite twisting for the tongue! Kit’s other poem ‘Watch Your French’ is very amusing and I am sure children would love it. The structure of the poem is clever starting with the narrator’s mother pouring fat on her foot and the using direct speech saying what she didn’t say in quite a sarcastic manner. Children could explore using speech marks in their poem and look at the position of the author and how that impacts the poem. Children could think of similar incidents and attempt to make their own poems with humor. This poem could be used for KS1 and early KS2 as the language is less complicated. The poem could be read as a whole class focusing on syllables or expression. Additional tip : Print off nets of cubes and cuboids ( photocopiable card ) and ask children to decorate their magic boxes then assemble them. The imaginative poem ‘The Magic Box’ by Kit Weight provides a wonderful opportunity to appreciate, perform and compose a fantasy poem. These resources are presented beautifully to also evoke an individual written response from the learners. A great poem to read aloud and perfect for children to use as a starting point for their own poetry.It leads the learners through each verse and encourages them to appreciate the rich language of the poet. A web link is provided for learners to see and hear the original poet perform the poem. The fate of the Supermarket Market Manager; I thought this was a fun description of an overly generous Shop Manager that ends up getting fired because of his good nature, it encompasses very good examples of rhyming prose for students learning the nature of poems. Following this you could get students to write a poem about their own quirky character in a similar style to this example. Whether it’s a poem of laughter or lament, Kit always reads with perfect rhythm and pace. Listen out in ‘Heads or Tails’, for his keen sense of comic timing. Kit Wright (b.1944) is an award-winning English author, who writes for both children and adults. Following a scholarship to Oxford, Wright became a lecturer in Canada, before returning the England to work as a full-time writer with a position in the Poetry Society. Prior to writing The Magic Box he had already won many awards, including the Faber Memorial Prize (1978), the Arts Council Writers Award (1985), the Heinemann Award (1990) and the Hawthornden Prize (1991). The Poem “Sea in the Trees” describes an old man sitting in the shade of a large ash tree, dreaming of the sea. I enjoyed reading this poem because of its strong connection to nature making it very soothing and relaxing. There are some good uses of rhyme with ‘made’ and ‘shade’, and ‘tree’ and ‘sea’. The poem very cleverly links the tree to the sea, harbor and a ship through various literary devices such as imagery and personification. This poem is suitable for KS2, not so much KS1. Children could be asked try and identify any literary devices, they can perform the poem themselves or make their own poem based on the main theme from Wright’s poem. Rhyming words can be analyzed, words that may be unknown could be explored. Children can review the poem saying why they liked it or not. The meaning of the poem: what the poet is trying to do, can be explored.

I have also provided a simple comprehension task which can be used to aid comprehension of the model poem if required. There are many opportunities for incidental learning e.g. grammar and word choice particularly adjectives, powerful verbs, similes and alliteration. Presentation B provides an opportunity to concentrate on the final 3 verses of the model poem - the ‘impossible things’ verse, what their box is made of and where they will travel in their box.The Magic Box is Wright’s best-known poem for children. It is often read in schools, and Wright himself often does readings of the poem. His poems for children are much beloved, by turns comic, silly, sad, and magical. My favourite poem was “The Magic Box” the book is named after. This is a imaginative abstract that describes a variety of beautiful, strange and wonderful things the narrator would put into their magic box. This would be a very effective at stimulating pupils’ imagination, and would be a good compliment to an English or Art lesson as you could get the children to describe what they would put in their magic box or get them to draw a picture of the magic box and all the wonderful things that were inside.