This week, years 5 and 6 have been getting their teeth stuck into a new poem – The Highwayman (by Alfred Noyes). After reading the poem as a class, we discussed the meaning behind the story of the poem, and which emotions may have driven the way for this sad story.
Here’s what we came up with as a class:
Lots of these ideas derived from Tim the ostler, who’s plan to have the Highwayman killed ended with the death of his beloved Bess, the landlord’s daughter.
The vocabulary in this poem lead to further learning in our writing lessons – we looked at speech between characters within this story and what they may say to one another. The vocabulary used in the poem suggested a formal piece of speech was necessary to suit the purpose and the timeline, so the children have been hard at work practising their formal writing!
Towards the end of the week, the children practised their retrieval skills. One of their tasks was to draw and label the Highwayman, based on information they could retrieve from the text. Below is a small snippet of the text and some fantastic learning the children – do you think they have retrieved information successfully? Which parts of their drawings were retrieved facts, and which elements were their own interpretations?
