Sounds Like Poetry: Big Book

The National Literacy Strategy has helped to raise standards for pupils with learning difficulties. This series is designed to support teachers in this area by providing attractive, stimulating and appropriate reading materials for children with moderate or severe learning difficulties across the 7-11 age range. The series includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and could help to support a multi-sensory approach to learning. The "Inclusive Readers Series" aims to do more than develop children's reading and writing; it aims to enable readers to extend their knowledge and understanding, to develop a fascination with language, to explore a range of emotions and, where appropriate, to help them to deal with difficult issues. The books represent positively many aspects of disability and reflect the cultural diversity of society. Each pack consists of: a 66-page A3 big book, with colour illustrations; a pull-out section of characters and images from the text to cut out and laminate for use in follow-up work; a teachers' book with half-termly and weekly plans, plus activities for pupils at different levels; and photocopiable differentiated versions of the text at four levels (P5-6, P7-1C and 1C-2A) for use with individual pupils - the lowest level using words with symbols. This is an anthology of poems selected for Year 5. Its theme is playing with language, and it features a range of styles including free verse and nonsense poems. Suggested activities include units on phonics. The nonsense words give ample opportunity to experiment with the sounds of letters and words, and the sensitive poetry allows teachers to examine the use of vowels and consonants in an interesting way.