Poetry Professional Development
Teachers
School Staff Meetings, Curriculum Days
A. Poetry P.D. Session
Be enthused to teach poetry in your classroom with creativity, humour, enjoyment and ease.
I will model, in a P.D. session, a wide variety of poetry forms, ideas and techniques suitable for students from Prep to Year 8 — or tailored to the needs of your own school.
Free ‘A-Z Book of Poetry Forms’ with every booking.
B. Performance Poetry
I will model a wide range of poems suitable for performing in front of an audience. These poems can be taken back to your classrooms (P–6) for the children to write their own versions for a whole school concert or for assembly items.
Free Poetry Performance book with every booking.
C. Mandala Poetry / Using Mandalas
A session on the many different ways you can use this medium as an adult, and with your class.
D. Creative Writing P.D (Poetry and Narrative)
INCLUDING… EASY Steps for all children to be able to plan the construction of a story for the Naplan Test.
My latest book, ‘Step Out of the Square’ (strategies to help your children write creatively) will be available in March this year, 2009. I have been working in conjunction with Colin Campbell, a former secondary teacher of English and author of poetry and short story collections. We have collaborated in a combination of strategies, ideas and models that are tried and proven, and have been developed over our last decade of teaching and in my case, working in schools all over Australia. These strategies help children to think outside the ‘Square of Predictability’ and write creatively in both poetry and narrative form.
Many of the activities, strategies and models contained in this book will be addressed in this session. By using the examples illustrated, I am sure that you will witness the same percentage of students completing a written piece in a short time that we perceive.
This P.D. will address many of these strategies and give you models to help every student in your class complete a piece of writing with ease, even those students who are reluctant to put pen to paper.
E. Level Meetings
This year, 2010, Jo is offering teachers the opportunity to work with her to write their own poetry program for their grade based on their elected themes in the format of a 'level meeting' for levels 1/2, 3/4 and 5/6.
OR
A meeting involving the sharing of strategies she uses with children for story writing to help them in the Naplan tests.
P.D. Testimonials
Your Poetry P.D. was an integral part of our professional development program. It was strongly focussed on the needs of young literacy learners and was useful in extending participants knowledge of poetry forms and teaching practices. The feedback from participants was extremely positive and indicated that the planning and delivery of your session more than met their expectations.
Joan Bradbury
Assistant General Manager
Early Years of Schooling Branch
Lots of practical ideas, fantastic, practical and humorous, thank you so much Jo, well presented, hilarious, enthused me, informative, I now know how to use a myriad of forms with my students, inspiring and informative, great ideas, most worthwhile.
Comments from evaluation forms
Early Years of Schooling Conferences Melbourne 1999-2005