Sharing scientific understanding through poetry

Sharing students’ scientific learning through poetry can be a powerful activity as it combines artistic expression with scientific understanding. Using fictional modes can make the science more accessible and personal for the creator and audience.

I was blown away by the level of creativity and language features that my students used in their poems about kōwhai trees. Having spent a week collecting and planting kōwhai seeds and observing kōwhai trees, students had an incredible amount of knowledge and vocabulary to use in their poetry. Initially, poetry seemed like a strange genre of writing to share their learning, but what each student produced far exceeded my expectations!

In this activity, students write poems about kōwhai trees as a way of sharing their learning. The activity includes sentence starters and examples written by year 5–6 learners working at levels 1–4 of the New Zealand Curriculum.

By the end of this activity, students should be able to:

• recognise that scientific learning can be shared in a variety of ways

• share their scientific understanding of kōwhai through poetry

• illustrate their poems in a way to add more meaning.

Download the Word file (see link below).