Exploring Poetry : Skills for the AQA Anthology: Character and Voice and Relationships

Supporting 'Voice' and 'Character and Relationships' in AQA's 2010 Anthology, this DVD and photocopiable resource will build your students' confidence and make poetry study pleasurable, as well as providing support for unseen poetry in exams. (Teachers of specifications other than AQA, preparing for unseen poetry may find this a useful resource in its own right.) Students can be turned off by being introduced to poetry via exam 'practice', or by over-doing the focus on line-by-line and poem-by-poem analysis.

The accent of this resource is on developing students' enthusiasm and skills in an active way and giving them the skills to dig deeper themselves.

It allows them to think more generally about aspects of poetry, that they can apply confidently to the poems they are studying.

Poets Michael Rosen, Patience Agbabi, Ian MacMillan, Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay and Andrew Forster bring a lively and direct 'poet's view' of poetry, reading and talking about individual poems. They model a way of thinking about poetry that will inform students' own approach and draw on individual poems to explain and explore key aspects of poetry such as: * What makes poetry special * Voice in poetry * Rhythm * Rhyme * Ballads and the oral tradition * The sonnet form There are also actor readings and visual representations of key poems in the two clusters, such as 'My Last Duchess', 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'Ozymandias'. The heart of this resource is the DVD. There are 'light touch' classroom resources to accompany it.