Dear all,

Thank you once again for your hard work last week. I’m glad you enjoyed Causley’s poem “My Mother saw a Dancing Bear”. It seemed to stir up strong feelings. There were some fantastic poems shared last week. Some special mentions to:

Selma (Remember to name your school in your posts) captured the tone of the Causley poem with her own ending:

They paid a penny for the dance
But what they saw was desperate sadness
With grey eyes like a hurricane in motion
And a pool of mournful melancholy

Henry Brett uses alliteration to enforce the sorrowful tone of the poem in his third line:

They paid a penny for the dance
But what they saw was a depresses scared
bear with bloodshot eyes
Starving to death begging for some food

Marcel of Duncombe showed creativity by considering what would happen if we changed the voice of the poem and ended with a first person speaker:

Ella of Gillespie led the debate on the issue of using bears for entertainment. Look at how she develops her argument in detail:

I’m against such an idea of training bears as it is not like training a dog or cat as they are bred by humans. Bears are naturally scared of humans and when I went to Canada a girl I met was chased by a bear because it was brought up near humans so it wasn’t afraid of them and it usually would run away so it would have been a bad idea to train it and it would be capable of more power. It is also unfair on the bear as it could not run away because it wouldn’t know how to feed itself and take care of himself. You may think that it looked like it was enjoying itself but it was just being trained to do that and I strongly disagree.

Sometimes we don’t have answers but further questions. It’s encouraging to see Mustafa still considering:

I want to ask you a question : why do you think the author wrote the poem as a story first?

Can you answer his question?

I hope you enjoy “In Flanders Fields”. You’ve got 2 more poems after Week 3 and then you’ll work on your own entry for the poetry competition. Could you be the next FutureZone Poet Laureate?

Check out the previous winners and see what techniques they used to be successful. Toby Kaye  reviewed last year’s winner Aaina Siddique from Duncombe School and commented:

“Their eyes met” was really nice because you used one syllable for each line.

Keep up the hard work.

Michael.