Please Mrs Butler: The timeless school poetry collection

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The young speaker tells her teacher that the boy is taking her rubber or eraser, and she wants him to stop. The poem follows the rhyme scheme of ABCB and uses a similar structure in the odd and even-numbered stanzas.

Poems such as: "small Quarrel" "Picking teams" "The gang" and so on could be read out loud to the whole class to get them thinking about issues in a subtle and non pressured way. Reading each poem made me chuckle, or sigh, and each and everyone made me think back to my own school experience. Moreover, the repetitive nature of the poem engaged the children to participate in the reading of the poem. The book can be used to provide children with short poems read aloud when there is spare time within the school day and as an introduction into reading and writing poetry.The reader is made to empathise with the persona, hopefully in turn engraining in a child the moral message behind this poem. For example, likes one and two of stanza two as well as the structures of all the odd-numbered stanzas. Great for Literacy and Drama as well as aiding teaching across the curriculum not forgetting the all important - Reading for Pleasure! This book would be particularly effective to share with upper key stage two who would not only understand the various issues that are raised in each poem but also understand Ahlberg’s use of humour.

These poems are set in classrooms, the playground, they explore schoolchildren's relationship with each other, and, in one of my favourite poems in the collection, the dreadful experience of visiting the nit nurse.Visiting the school prompts an extended meditation on the passage of time, on his great muse Maud Gonne, and on Yeats’s own life. Also, examples such as being picked last for teams could be used as a focus for circle time, particularly in a class where any children many feel singled out. A fun lesson that I have taught is reading for performance which seems to always go down really well with the children as they really enjoy bringing the poem to life with their own expression and twist on the poems.

I think they can easily be read to the class, probably a year 2 or 3 class, as well as children reading them to themselves or in guided reading. Please Mrs Butler was voted the most important twentieth-century children's poetry book in a Books for Keeps poll.He has published over 100 children's books and, with his late wife Janet, created such award winning picture books as EACH PEACH PEAR PLUM and THE JOLLY POSTMAN - both winners of the Kate Greenaway Medal. Readers are likely expecting to hear the teacher chastise the child, Derek, and possibly praise the young speaker for doing what’s right. It is a great book for the younger children to have as their first introduction to poetry, and for the slightly older children to obtain ideas from and improve their poetry writing skills. Through rhyming couplets and short punchy lines Ahlberg creates a fun yet informative read for children of all ages.

Rather than provide a solution, the teacher dismisses the issue and tries to get the student to solve it themselves. Due to oversaturation, it is not my favourite of the collection, but I do think this whole book is filled with very clever observations of the absurdities of both children and teachers and creates a lot of nostalgia. me and amy bray and charlotte bricknell and lucy slaven and katie darke used to read this at our school and it was amazin and used to make us laugh.Allan Ahlberg (5 June 1938) and Janet Ahlberg (21 October 1944 – 13 November 1994) , née Janet Hall, were a British married couple who created many children's books, including picture books that regularly appear at the top of most popular lists for public libraries. His first book of school poems was published over thirty years ago, but you will almost certainly recognise some of the things that the children, teachers and parents say.