Orion’s Way

Analyse poems about stars to guide personal composition of a poem on the northern lights.  

• Display the rhyme, Twinkle Twinkle Little Starungroup, found on Speak and Play English.  
• Show students the table (with the ticks omitted). Instruct them to place a tick in each column that includes an element featured in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  

• Read the poem, Orion’s Way. Again, instruct students to complete the relevant row in the table.  
• Discuss students preferences. Most students will likely select Orion’s Way. Refer to the table, identifying the language choices included in the poem students preferred. Discuss students preferences, guiding them with sentence starters such as: 
• I particularly like poems that feature language choices such as… (e.g. metaphor) 
• I find language choices such as… (e.g. repetition) really help me to connect to the subject matter in a poem.  

Experiment with adopting their preferred style by following the steps below:  

• Place students in pairs, based on their preferences (e.g. metaphor or repetition). Tell students to examine what they like about the example of language choice in the poem they chose in more depth. For example, if discussing the metaphor in Orion’s Way, students may identify that the unique comparison, of the night sky as star crumbs, really helped create a vivid picture in their mind.  
• Discuss the northern lights (aurora polaris), ensuring students are aware that they are a natural phenomenon of shafts of coloured light that are sometimes visible in the sky. More on the northern lights can be found on the Everyday Mysteriesungroup page on the Library of Congress site.   
• Discuss the term, time lapse videos, informing students if they are not aware that they are videos shot at regular intervals then speeded up to show changes over time. Show students the video, Night of the Northern Lightsungroup on YouTube, informing students that this is a time lapse video.  
• Refer back to Orion’s Way, highlighting that the poem features one sentence spread across multiple lines.  
• Instruct students to create a poem, outlining their response to the video of the northern lights. Tell them to include their preferred language choice in their poem. Provide an example, featuring the language choice of metaphor, such as:  

Those scattered lines,  

Of bold and bright light towers,  

dance across the sky, 

in a vivacious, jaunty rainbow.  

Display the following success criteria to guide students’ poems: 

• Describes response to video on the northern lights 
• Includes one single sentence spread over multiple lines 

• Features preferred language choice, either repetition or metaphor