Juniors Find Their Voice

It takes nerve to stand in front of a packed hall and read something you wrote yourself. At five years old, it takes considerably more. This year’s Junior School Poetry Showcase opened with exactly that, hosted by two confident student MCs Matilda Johnson and Eliza Campbell.

This afternoon’s showcase marked the culmination of the term of poetry learning across the school. Students developed and refined their poems through literacy learning with their classroom teachers, while Speech and Drama lessons supported them in exploring how poetry can be communicated effectively through performance. The result was a wonderful celebration of both poetry writing and oral language.

Each class brought something different to the stage. The Year 0 to 2 classes shared original works that painted word pictures of the four seasons rolling into one another. Individual students read poems built around whichever season meant the most to them. Winter came up again and again, complete with the requisite mug of hot chocolate, proof these poets were writing straight from the week’s chilly mornings.

The comic highlights came from Year 3. Class 3JS performed Judi Billcliff's “Help! Mum is a Hen!”, in which a mother turns into a clucking hen and a father into a cat, chaos that ends with scrambled egg on toast. Class 3MM brought the same energy to Kenn Nesbitt's “Good Morning, Mrs Hamster,” about a science experiment gone wrong that swaps a teacher’s brain with her class pet’s.

To close, Gus Simonovic, who delivered several writing workshops throughout the term, performed one of his own poems. The original piece reflected on his own migration to New Zealand told through the story of an unfamiliar constellation. The prose was a fitting reminder that poetry can hold both the very large and the very personal. For a room full of five, six and seven-year-olds, it was a confident, funny, and insightful afternoon of poetry.