A Quick and Dirty celebration of National Poetry Day was organised on Thursday this week.

based on the The Keepers Poetry Project and the original Keepers poem by Phil Whitehead.

All the children in primary 2 to 7 attempted to write a verse in the last hour of Thursday. Primary Seven pupils types the poems up for the Sandaig Poets blog. apart from the odd file going astray this was a success: 150 verses written.

On Friday we recorded a podcast for Radio Sandaig with some verses from each class. for the sake of speed I did the editing on Friday evening and Saturday morning. This was the first time we have recorded children out side of p6 and p7, great excitement, but all the children took the recording very seriously indeed.

Next time we try this, it would probably be better to start before 2 o’clock, so that the children could see their poems online straight away, the primary seven typists just finished at 3 o’clock.

Two thoughts, one how easy it was to do the blogging involving a lot of children. Next time I’d be tempted to create a blog just for the day and have a category for each class so that the children see their poems go up one at a time. The second thought is that it would have been pretty difficult to do the podcast if I was not released from class. Classroom podcasting would have a lot of background noise, I was able to record the children (or let the older ones record themselves in the music room). Mind you the Radio Sandaig team can now handle recording without help, so maybe next time they could do the whole thing.