Picts and Poets

A Return Residency

Following the success of Poet in the City in 2006, the writer Liz Niven returned to Buckie Community High School in March 2007 for a second residency. This time the project had a cross-curricular theme, involving joint working between the English and history departments, once again with the support of school librarian Sara Marsh. The project was funded as part of the Scottish Book Trust Live Literature Scotland schools' residency scheme and provided a series of workshops for first year pupils and their teachers.

A Curriculum for Excellence in action

Picts and Poetry - across the curriculum and beyond

In history the pupils discovered about the Picts and their symbols and visited famous local sites including Sueno's Stone and the Pictish fort at Burghead. Writer Liz Niven joined in some of the history lessons and used the historic material to inspire the children to produce a variety of poetry and creative texts during language lessons.

As well as working with a professional writer, the pupils had the added incentive of knowing there would be various public outcomes for their work, partly in connection with the Buckie Festival, including an in-house published anthology, a performance with music and dance, poems on banners around Buckie and on bookmarks - and poems on origami boats to be launched in Buckie Harbour!

This interdisciplinary project exemplifies many of the purposes and principles of A Curriculum for Excellence, with careful thought given to the environment for learning, the choice of the teaching and learning approaches and the organisation of the learning during the residency and beyond, ensuring coherence, relevance, challenge and enjoyment - and a lasting impact on all involved.

Staff and Pupil Responses

History teacher Ruth Matheson writes: "After an initial orientation exercise at Elgin museum, pupils saw for themselves the splendour of Sueno's Stone in Forres and the bleak but vitally strategic Pictish fort at Burghead. Soaking in the atmosphere of these prominent historical locations, the pupils were then asked to write empathetic poems based on what they had seen, heard, touched and felt."

Jan Hodges from the English department reflected: " I felt the time Liz Niven spent with 1R2 was very productive, with pupils producing interesting, intriguing poetry. Working in a cross-curricular way with the history department was also a positive bridging experience when pupils could see the same information from different perspectives. Liz Niven was enthusiastic, encouraging and highly imaginative in her approach. This led to an enjoyable poetic experience for the pupils."

Pupils in 1S2 clearly felt they had gained much from the experience: "Our class was lucky enough to work with the Poet in Residence Liz Niven. We had been creating Scottish poems with our student teacher Miss Innes and Liz showed us how to edit these. She had some of our poems and projected them onto a big screen so we could see the first draft and the improved version. Two senior pupils, Jack and Kerry, helped us to write some new poetry about Buckie in the Year 3007. We are planning to create a class anthology of our poems and call it "Scotland and Me". We are all excited about planning a presentation of our poems to an invited audience."

The LiL perspective: a workshop snapshot

Getting the creative juices flowing

Liz Niven joined an S1 class and their teacher to develop a poetic response to their visit to Sueno's Stone. Liz began with a working title "A Pictish Trip into the Past" and after encouraging the children to explore and enjoy the sounds these words made, she helped them to focus in on their memories of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings from each part of the day, gathering their ideas into a class poem on the whiteboard, which was then read and reviewed together.

Individual responses

After this whole-class introduction, the children began to develop individual poems about the trip. Liz encouraged the pupils to be specific, to home in on detail, like a telescope, to take a particular moment, one moment, to focus on themselves in that moment and use all their senses and include their thoughts or feelings. Previously the children had written a four verse poem addressing each of the four faces of Sveno's Stone, but this poem deliberately had no set structure, emphasising instead a personal response and attention to detail. The children wrote intensively, occasionally asking for support or querying an idea.

Refining the draft

Fifteen minutes before the end of the lesson, Liz asked the children to re-focus and read over their work, giving them some prompts and tips: Have you used the best words? And are they in the best places? Are there words you don't need? Are your descriptions vivid? Comparisons? Specific details? Name things - don't be general! Don't be frightened to use personal, tiny wee details. What about rhythms and patterns? And think about line-endings - is it like a story, or is it zingy? The children then shared their work with the class.

Reflecting on the experience

All the children responded productively to the task, linking the historic to the poetic and deepening their experience as they produced interesting and personal texts. The children had previously experimented with free/wild writing with Liz and the confidence this had given them as writers showed during the workshop. They commented that they had enjoyed the free writing, and working with Liz they said they had learned how to focus, to go for detail, to experiment with shortening lines and to feel free to use Scots.

Their teacher had not worked with a professional writer before and felt she had learned a lot about how to get children writing poetry from scratch, had seen the great benefits of the "wild" writing and had also found it very helpful to have the chance to observe her children at work.

This was just one session within a truly collaborative and well-planned cross-curricular project, harnessing many of the powerful opportunities afforded by A Curriculum for Excellence, enabling the pupils to take important steps towards becoming "successful learners" and offering staff the chance to develop their practice and learn from each other as well as from Liz.

Sustainability

The subject of the Picts was new to the school, but was embraced by both departments and is set to become a regular feature of the curriculum in coming years: the history and English departments are keen to continue to collaborate on a project which clearly offers such rich and worthwhile learning opportunities.