Year 2: Who was Benjamin Zephaniah?

This week we have been looking at the poet, Benjamin Zephaniah. We learned a little bit about his life, before looking at one of his poems - Fair Play.

The children learned how to recite the poem, creating actions to remember each line, and repeated it out loud with expression. We then looked at the first line of the poem - "Mirror Mirror on the Wall" - which originally came from the story of Snow White. We explored other famous fairy tale lines to see which ones we could use to create our own poems. The children were inspired particularly by "Run run run as fast as you can, you can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man" and "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman."

The children used these as the first line in their own poems, and worked well together to come up with different rhyming pairs.