POETRY TAKES CENTRE STAGE IN SCHOOLS FOR BBC COMPETITION
National contest: Primary school teachers can nominate one 7-11 year old to represent their school
12 finalists will perform at next year’s Oxford Literary Festival
Competition will be the subject of a 90 minute BBC Two film
Poetry is about to take centre stage in primary schools across the UK for the launch of an exciting BBC competition to find the pupil who can best recite  well known poems off by heart.
Every primary school teacher in the UK can put forward one 7-11 year old pupil from their school to enter the contest and see if they can clinch the coveted title. But it’s not for the faint hearted! The pupil chosen to represent their school, will then do battle with their peers in regional heats which will be held in libraries up and down the UK.
The nationwide group of poetry performers will then be whittled down to just 12 finalists who’ll compete at a final compered by Jeremy Paxman during The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival next April.
To help them improve their performance all the finalists will be taken through their paces during a master class with actors and poets.
The winner will be awarded an Off By Heart trophy and his or her school will also receive a prize. The whole process will be documented in a one off 90 minute film by independent production company Silver River and will be shown on BBC Two. But there’s more to reciting poetry than just being able to memorise William Wordsworth’s musings or Roald Dahl’s rhymes.
The eventual winner of the UK contest will have to show that they not only understand the poems in question, but they will have to prove they can perform them too.
Daisy Goodwin, who’s edited eight poetry anthologies and is Head of Silver River says, “Learnt young, poems will stay in the head for life, adding lustre to the good moments and illumination in the bad. Who knows how many hitherto unpromising nine-year olds may discover a fluency and confidence that they never knew they possessed and find themselves on the path to greatness?”
To enter the competition teachers should visit: bbc.co.uk/schools/teachers/offbyheart
The closing date for entries is 19th December 2008.
Poems to learn Off By Heart:
- Alligator by Grace Nichols
- The Way Through The Woods by Rudyard Kipling
- The Pig by Roald Dahl
- Daffodils by William Wordsworth
- The Owl and The Pussycat by Edward Lear
- Leisure by W H Davies
- Talking Turkeys by Benjamin Zephaniah
- Matilda by Hilaire Belloc
- The Tyger by William Blake
- A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns
- The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
- The Walrus and The Carpenter by Lewis Carroll
- The King’s Breakfast by A A Milne
- Macavity: The Mystery Cat by T S Eliot
- The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W B Yeats
How to learn verse
1. Read the poem to yourself.
2. Now read the first line of the poem out loud. Take your eyes from the page and immediately say the line again. Glance back to make sure you got it right. If you made a mistake, try again. Now do the same with the second line. Repeat the procedure for every line in the poem.
3. Go back to the beginning. This time, read the first two lines out loud, look away and repeat them aloud. Check. If you made a mistake, try again. Now move on to the next two lines, going through the whole poem two lines at a time.
4. Repeat the process three lines at a time, then four lines at a time, then five and then six. By the sixth pass, no matter how long the poem, you will have it memorised.
5. Recite the whole poem just before you go to bed at night.
6. Crucial: stop thinking about the poem. Your sleeping mind is very important for memory.
7. The next day, you should find (after a glance at the first line to bump-start your memory) that you can recite the whole poem.
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