Students Use Creative Methods to Explore English

Lego is most definitely not just for toyboxes and playrooms! Year 10 students have been using the brightly-coloured bricks to explore the construction of poetry.

Year 10 students used Lego to begin their explorations of GCSE poetry analysis. Mrs Hunn-Smith explains “students often have a bit of a mental block before approaching the poetry element of the syllabus: it can feel like a very alien form of literature.”

Working in pairs, the students picked a type of building to create from the huge box of Lego. They discussed what features their buildings would have to make them recognisable and worked collaboratively to create them.

When we gathered the finished creations together, the class were able to recognise exactly what each group had set out to build because of the set features that were included. This then led into a discussion about how poets consciously construct different sorts of poems using different ‘bricks’ and to achieve different purposes.

Just as the Lego lighthouse had white and red stripes and a sense of height, or the beach hut had a miniature-house design complete with pathway to the beach, so a poet chooses their rhythm, rhyme and verse structure to match their overall creative intentions.

Now that we are busy annotating, analysing and evaluating the set poems, we keep referring back to those Lego building blocks to remember how each choice of word or punctuation or rhyme is a ‘brick’ in the poem, contributing to its overall meanings.