National Poetry Week – Freedom theme

National Poetry Day took place on Thursday 28^th September and Northgate High School was one of many organisations that took part in events celebrating the power of poetry.

We declared the week of National Poetry Day to be poetry week and each day we shared a poem of the day related to this year’s theme- freedom!

These poems included:

Poetry and the Dragon by A F Harrold

Caged Bird by Maya Angelou

In Wellies by Sarah Crossan

Freedom Poem by Michaela Morgan and

Between the Dog and the Wolf (after Aesop) by James Carter

Videos of all these poems (and more) can be found on the PoetryLine website here:

Students also had the opportunity to create their own poems at our poetry stations. The Learning Hub was set up with a number of different poetry activities throughout the week; Gabriel in Year 8 tells us more:

‘For National Poetry Day I made a newspaper poem. A newspaper poem is when you cut certain words out of a newspaper and make a poem out of those words. I enjoyed today because everybody was doing fun activities including black-out poems, book spine poems and creating posters about poems.’

We also held a competition that asked students to write a poem on the theme of freedom. There were so many fantastic entries, but after much consideration the winners were chosen.

Tia and Mia in 7CW took joint 3^rd place with their poems, ‘Freedom Poem’ and ‘Freedom.’

Anne in 9MMU won the prize for 2^nd place with her poem ‘The Voices.’

Finally, our 1^st place winner was Hannah in 8LM for her fantastic poem ‘Eagle Soaring’ inspired by the experience of slaves getting their freedom.

All of our winners received a notebook as a prize, encouraging them to keep on writing.

Overall, students had a fantastic National Poetry day where they were able to explore, create and share poems. We hope this stays with them and that they continue to discover the wonders found in poetry both while at school and beyond.