The school holidays are almost here!  If you’re looking for some inspiration all you need to do is step outside; Autumn is the perfect time of the year for a poetry walk.

Poetry isn’t about sitting around at a desk and agonising over writing rules. It’s about going out and doing things! It’s about playing with words and getting creative. And it’s fantastic for building vocabulary.

Your child might be mad about writing but if they’re not that’s no problem. Reluctant and struggling writers can get just as hooked on words once they start thinking like poets.

So how do you get started?

Take your child for a walk and offer a few poetic observations as you wander. Things like, ‘Wow!  That cloud looks like…’ or ‘the air smells like…’ etc.

Don’t worry about whether or not your observations are good. This is about being playful.

Give things new names. A kanuka might become a tangly-tangly tree. My 3 year old, Jack, renamed a snail a ‘fancy-back’.

Bring a treasure back home; an interesting coloured leaf or a strange shaped stick. Glue it to a sheet of paper and write a line or two together.

Poems are alive. You just have to go out and hunt for them. Sometimes you have to take them home and write them down. Sometimes you can just let them race around on their own outdoors.

Here’s one of my favourite collaborative poems.  It grew out of a poetry walk with my wonderful class from Pokuru School…

Our class is on a poem walk

The tree bark is the skin of a tuatara

Or the rough hide of a wallowing rhinoceros

Stones are the backs of slow moving crocodiles

The bare branches dangle like spider’s legs  

The wet dirt smells of burning rope.

Have fun and enjoy the holidays!

Caroline