Loveliest of trees the cherry now...

I have been struck recently by just how beautiful the cherry trees have been this year, they seem to be particularly dazzling and long lasting. As I was driving to a school near Bishop Auckland today through grey miserable weather they provided splashes of relieving colour and I turned to thinking about A.E. Housman's poem:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow. Over recent weeks when walking with my family I have taken to irritating my 12 year old son by quoting this poem whenever we pass under the blossom decked cherry trees. Unsurprisingly he tells me how unimpressed he is by my poetic musings, however when I mentioned it tonight both he and his sister could quote the opening lines. I am a great believer in the power of learning poetry, there is a great pleasure to be derived from having an apposite line or two to conjure up and it can provide a valuable way in to great literature for kids - as long as it's not their dad reciting the lines! As I pass by the cherry trees Housman's words play through my mind like an irresistibly catchy tune, and provoke me to look closer and enjoy the blooms more. Perhaps it is something to do with the message of the poem urging me to extract maximum pleasure out every opportunity, perhaps heightened by me having fewer of 'my threescore years and ten' than Housman did when he wrote the piece. Either way the words encourage me to look and enjoy and remember those moments. As W.H. Davies says, in a similar vein, in his poem Leisure.. 'What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare' This brings me back to teaching and how learning poetry and engaging with the words can be a powerful tool in the classroom. It also opens up all sorts of opportunities for creative ways to work with multi-media and 'hide' the poetry learning inside exciting, engaging and challenging activities which will help children to remember great lines of verse. This led me to brainstorming ideas for working with the poem as a starting point whilst I was grinding along the A1. Here are a few: Chance for a walk, taking digital photos of cherry trees and more as we go. Researching other poems with a spring theme, reading, sharing, importing and creating a class portfolio, illustrated with images from our walk Uploading the images to Picasa (free photo editing software) and editing and enhancing them, including captions with lines from the poem(s) Learning some or all of the poem, reciting and recording in Audacity (free multi track audio editing software) adding appropriate sound effects and/or music before exporting as MP3 Emailing MP3 to home, friends/family as a record, putting onto iPods etc Creating slides shows of images and using the recordings as a sound track using Photo Story 3 (free slide show creation software) Writing our own poems and adding to the portfolio, before repeating some of the ideas above with our own versions And that's all before going really cross curricular and finding out about the life cycle of the cherry tree and researching other plants animals etc. featured in our other poems; mapping our walk on paper and on google maps; finding out about the lives of our poets (check first as Housman for example may bring up some tricky issues for a primary classroom!); look at the number of petals on the flowers and see how they will often be a Fibonacci number etc. etc. etc.... It is so empowering as a teacher to be able to pursue our own ideas, enthusiasms and passions whilst giving the children opportunities to learn in a wide range of ways and I'm really pleased to note a real upsurge at the moment of schools and teachers re-taking control of the curriculum and making it theirs again. It's time to have more confidence in our ideas and the strengths and passions we have and sharing those with OUR children and taking them on journeys they might want to be on.