Myths about teaching can hold you back
- Year 2
Exploring and performing 'River Lullaby' by Matt Goodfellow
I can explore a poem and perform it for an audience.
Copyrighted materials: to view and download resources from this lesson, you’ll need to be in the UK and
- Year 2
Exploring and performing 'River Lullaby' by Matt Goodfellow
I can explore a poem and perform it for an audience.
Copyrighted materials: to view and download resources from this lesson, you’ll need to be in the UK and
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Lesson details
Key learning points
- Matt Goodfellow is an award-winning poet and former teacher.
- The poem ‘River Lullaby’ tells a story about the journey of a river.
- The poet uses different poetic devices including onomatopoeia, alliteration and repetition.
- When performing a poem, we should try to have fun.
- Using gestures can make our performances fun and interesting for the audience to watch.
Keywords
Lullaby - a gentle, soothing song sung to help a child fall asleep
Repetition - the repeated use of sounds, words or phrases
Onomatopoeia - a type of word that sounds like what it describes
Gesture - a movement that helps express an idea or meaning
Common misconception
Pupils may not be confident in identifying or discussing the sounds that a river makes.
Play pupils a video of river sounds before reading and exploring the poem. If you have access to the book 'Caterpillar Cake' by Matt Goodfellow, it would be beneficial to share the illustrations accompanying the poem with the children.
To help you plan your year 2 English lesson on: Exploring and performing 'River Lullaby' by Matt Goodfellow, download all teaching resources for free and adapt to suit your pupils' needs...
To help you plan your year 2 English lesson on: Exploring and performing 'River Lullaby' by Matt Goodfellow, download all teaching resources for free and adapt to suit your pupils' needs.
The starter quiz will activate and check your pupils' prior knowledge, with versions available both with and without answers in PDF format.
We use learning cycles to break down learning into key concepts or ideas linked to the learning outcome. Each learning cycle features explanations with checks for understanding and practice tasks with feedback. All of this is found in our slide decks, ready for you to download and edit. The practice tasks are also available as printable worksheets and some lessons have additional materials with extra material you might need for teaching the lesson.
The assessment exit quiz will test your pupils' understanding of the key learning points.
Our video is a tool for planning, showing how other teachers might teach the lesson, offering helpful tips, modelled explanations and inspiration for your own delivery in the classroom.
Explore more key stage 1 English lessons from the Performance poetry unit, dive into the full primary English curriculum, or learn more about lesson planning.
Equipment
You need access to the poem 'River Lullaby', which is available in the additional materials for this lesson.
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