What do you need to keep warm?
As part of our whole school Seeking Sanctuary week with the theme of ‘Healing’, we have been thinking about the concept of ‘warmth’. Later in the week we will be rewriting the incredible poem by Neil Gaimon ‘What you need to be warm’, which was written after Neil posed the question to his 25 million twitter followers. The result (alongside corresponding artwork) became the poem used for the 2022 Refugee Week.
we began by thinking literally about the word warm before thinking more emotionally and metaphorically. After this we looked at the beginning of the poem and, working collaboratively in pairs, wrote our versions of the next 6 lines.
We then looked at another section of the poem and listened to each other perform it; really thinking deeply about how the poem could be read. We used a key to annotate where we paused, for how long and where we changed emphasis or intonation before comparing how we read it with other children in the class.
Finally we watched Neil Gaimon perform the entire poem and read along, discussing language choices, emotion and author intentions.
There were some amazing insights and we look forward to seeing what the children write later in the week.
