“This is my favourite kit and we try and do this each year. I love the variety of the writing activities and poems, and how they make us think. The tasks challenge the students' preconceived ideas about what they think poetry should be. I often reuse the poetry ideas and other teachers in the school (who don't have the kit) love using the ideas too. The poems that the kids create are shared at assembly and in our newsletter. The extra freebies that arrive in the kit for the teacher are an extra special treat.”
“Loved this kit, not only did it inspire writing but it was a fantastic way of getting students to look outside their world into the read of NZ. The Just to Say was such a fun and hilarious activity that they wanted to keep repeating it. We really appreciated the work we received from the other class. The anticipation of getting it after lockdown inspired us to look at the map of NZ again and do ours again to see if we ould improve it.”
“We loved this kit. Despite the hiccups (Covid) throughout this kit the writing ideas and motivations were great and really inspired our kids to write. Thank you to the sponsors for the goodies in the kit it is great to have these to use and to share with learners who truly get to shine through these writing ideas. These kits motivate me to try different ways of writing that I otherwise would not consider, and then I go on to use them again. Win-win! Thanks so much! We will open our bag on Monday, there is a lot of excitement about this!”
“Poem scaffolding was excellent, with a great variety, with great student outcomes. The end products were perhaps more meaningful for one's own class as an audience than the buddy class, however, and guidance on generating/transferring ideas to cards 8/16/24/32 would have been helpful, but we got there. Well worth it the effort.”
“This parcel of resources of course, as per normal, were fantastic. The package were received was great, well done buddy school. The actual activity was not the greatest. The concept of the abstract poem was way to hard for my class to grasp. We read the original poem and were pretty perplexed and then we attempted to write our own. We got there in the end but adjusted it to suit our abilities. The idea of the map was great but yet again pretty random. With minimal technology in our class and with minimal experience of my children it was a fun task. A couple of kids took it and ran with it and I finished it off. We are class with at least 60% ESOL students. It would be much more fun to have activities that the kids could work on individually and without too much technical work... what happened to the simple Acrostic or limerick. More information needs to go out about what the writing entails before sign up. If I had known it was as hard as it was I wouldn't have signed up. Not the usual happy campers... Sorry!”
“As always another great writing kit. My students enjoyed the lessons leading up to the final product. Lots of humor and excitement during the research process. Thanks once again to all who made it possible to participate.”
