Welcome!

Hello and welcome!

Below you will find information about my new publication, Poems for the Geography classroom .

I am a Geography teacher in the North-east of England. My interest in poetry pre-dates my role as a teacher, but increasingly I have used poems in the classroom to stimulate students' interest. Geography is such a visual subject, and it has always surprised me that poetry seems an under-utilised, if not quite untapped area of the subject. I have put together fifty poems in this publication, covering diverse areas of the subject, from earthquakes and volcanoes to map skills, a sense of place and the range of difficulties that face our fragile environment. The poems are such an open-ended resource that students of different ages and abilities should be able to understand them, but at different levels. Primarily, my thinking is that they can be used with older Key stage 2 students and more generally within the Key Stage 3 curriculum. However, I myself have used them with GCSE students too and found them to be just as effective. A list of the poems can be found within this blog. In addition, I am fully aware as a practising teacher how important it is to have practical strategies and suggestions on hand to use. Consequently, the first chapter in the book gives twenty extensive and imaginative suggestions as to how the poems can be used in the classroom to stimulate discussion and further understanding. Equally, consideration is taken of how to make them appeal to different types of learners, whether it be visual, kinaesthetic and so on.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and please do feel free to utilise the example resources provided below. Should this stimulate any further interest, details of the book and how to order it can be found at the EPRINT website at

www.eprint.co.uk

Best wishes

Mark Cowan