✕

Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

9 ways to help your child love poetry

Mum and child reading together
Use National Poetry Day as an excuse to enjoy the creative wordplay that poetry can offer! Coax out the budding poet in your child with these games and activities, and boost their literacy skills the fun way.

Whether it’s through the wise words of Oompa Loompas, the short limericks of Edward Lear or the classic tales of Dr. Seuss, poetry has long been used in children’s books as a way to communicate in a different, engaging style. Rhyming poems have a natural musical element that makes them easy to remember, while non-rhyming poems capture beautiful images in a way that a block of text might not be able to.

National Poetry Day offers a great opportunity to help children engage with poetry and learn about what makes it different from other forms of writing. Focus on one or all of these three areas when you and your child talk about poetry.

Rhyming

  1. Liven up the daily walk to school or drive to the supermarket with some rhyming practice. Can your child think of rhymes for objects you see on your travels? The sillier, the better!
  2. Say a phrase to your child, and have them respond with a rhyming phrase.
  3. Challenge your child to speak in rhyme for an entire day – even it means making words up!

Imagination

  1. Have your child pick a word out of a hat, and describe the images and thoughts that come into their head when they read it out loud.
  2. Use magnetic poetry strips, or write single words on bits of paper to create free verse poems. Get the family together and take turns picking a word to add to a poem.
  3. Try writing different kinds of poems that have specific rules around them. For instance, haikus are three-line poems that have a certain number of syllables in each line – five, seven and five, respectively. Kennings enrich poetry using a two-word phrase in the place of a one-word noun. ABC poems use a sequential letter of the alphabet to start each line with – see how far through the alphabet your child can get. Or, stretch creativity with a shape poem, which is written about a shape, and looks like that shape!

Poets

  1. Help your child memorise a short poem – a great way to boost both their memory skills and their confidence.
  2. Pick out poems written centuries ago by poets such as John Donne, Lord Byron and William Blake, and compare them to poems written today (you can find recent poetry prize winners at The Poetry Society. Ask your child whether they notice differences in writing style, words used, etc.
  3. Read a collection of children’s poems out loud. Michael Rosen, Roald Dahl and Shel Silverstein are great child-friendly poets to start with, or you can borrow a treasury of verse from the library. The amazing Children's Poetry Archive lets you listen to famous poets reading their own work out loud, for free, or find videos of poets performing their work on YouTube.

Think you might have a budding poet on your hands? Inspire your child to write poetry themselves with our tips, or kick-start creativity with a practical poetry-writing activity.

Poetry books for children