Please Mrs Butler: The timeless school poetry collection

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Allan is perfectly tuned in to the language of the classroom, the playground and the kitchen table. His first book of school poems was published over thirty years ago, but you will almost certainly recognise some of the things that the children, teachers and parents say. (So will your teachers, we’re willing to bet!) In ‘Please Mrs Butler’, you can hear him speak with voice of the teacher and the child. Both sound more and more desperate. I remember how my primary school teacher would read this to the class during story time. We loved the rhyme and being able to relate to the poems so much that we kept reciting the "Please Mrs Butler" poem for weeks.

There aren’t many modern or contemporary poems which recall schooldays with affection, but ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ does just that. Duffy paints a fond picture of her time at primary school and on the brink of adolescence, powerfully suggested by the poem’s final image of the sky breaking into a thunderstorm. Please Mrs Butler was a poem book that was read to me while in primary school and i still think it is a really fun book. It relates to school life and highlights different incident within the school. A child continually asks her teacher what to do about a boy who is constantly disturbing her, copying work and stealing rubbers. These are likely incidents all children have experienced while in school which makes it relevant to them. The unexpected responses the teacher gives makes the book humours and comical. The Short paragraphs and the repetition allow the children to anticipate what will come next, encouraging their participation. It is also a book children can easily read independently. Please Mrs. Butler’by Allan Ahlberg is a six-stanza poem that is divided into sets of four lines, known as quatrains. These quatrains follow a simple rhyme scheme of ABCB; changing end sounds from stanza to stanza. It’s also worth noting that all the odd-numbered stanzas and even-numbered stanzas follow a simple line structure. This helps keep up a steady rhythm and makes sure that the three parts of the poem are very easily distinguished from one another. This poem appeals to both children and teachers alike, thanks to its structure: the odd stanzas are spoken by a particularly talkative child complaining about what other children are doing, and the even stanzas comprise the teacher Mrs Butler’s responses to the child’s requests, with mounting frustration. Anyone who’s endured a particularly fraught and annoying class at school (and let’s face it, which of us hasn’t?) will find something that strikes a chord here. According to a list I saw the other day, Please Mrs Butler is one of the top ten favourite children's poems in the UK. It is the first poem in this collection and we used to have it read to us in infant school every day so it felt. Due to oversaturation, it is not my favourite of the collection, but I do think this whole book is filled with very clever observations of the absurdities of both children and teachers and creates a lot of nostalgia. They are a little old-fashioned. Even when I was in school, teachers didn't smoke in the staffroom and headteachers couldn't punish children with slippers, and that was over thirty years ago, so I've no idea how accurate it is to MODERN primary school life, but it certainly feels accurate to what I remember. I always think this would make an excellent school play.Anaphora: the repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of multiple lines. For example, “Go and sit” in stanza two. This is a brilliantly child friendly book that they can relate to due to the wording and the way the poems are written. Children will really love the poems as they are a focussed around children's everyday lives and their lives within school. The poems are also written in a way that adults can relate to, as quite often the poem is from the view point of the teacher or the adult. There are many types of poetry used throughout the book, mainly written to sound like children speaking, and also full of humour. From the opening verse of the first poem it is easy to see how beneficial such a collection is to a child's understanding of the features of the literary form such as structure, verse, rhythm and rhyming couplets: Ahlberg wrote his first book when he was thirty-seven, after a decade of teaching - a profession that he maintains is "much harder" than being a writer. He says that if he hadn't become a writer, he would have loved to be a soccer player. He was married for many years to fellow children's author Janet Ahlberg, with whom he often worked. Their daughter, Jessica Ahlberg, is also a children's author.

The poem is about a student asking the teacher for help with minor inconveniences in the classroom. Rather than helping, the teacher expresses her irritation and frustration with having to always be the one to fix these relatively insignificant issues. Differentiated group activities Using the technique of text marking the children are to find and mark the different sections of the poem, identifying any patterns that they notice. This begins with noting the rhymes in individual stanzas; and could lead on to how the six stanzas are divided up into 3 'sections'. Supply Teacher' is one of my favourites. Ahlberg uses an introductory verse followed by two verses concluded with the all too familiar phrases; The final line is perfect as it breaks from the pattern of the two previous verses, but maintains the effective structure; In the first lines of this poem, the speaker, a young student, begins by asking their teacher what to do about a boy copying their school work. Because the child says “This boy” when referring to “Derek Drew,” it seems like the speaker is a young girl.Through rhyming couplets and short punchy lines Ahlberg creates a fun yet informative read for children of all ages. Younger children can enjoy the musicality of the poems when read aloud, whilst older children can appreciate the rhymes and relatable content of the verses. Anyone who is currently in school, or has ever been in school, will see something of themselves in at least one of these poems.

Alliteration: a common literary device in children’s poetry. It’s seen through the repetition of consonant sounds, like “Derek Drew.” Death of a Naturalist’ – the title poem from Heaney’s first collection of poems, published in 1966 – is a poem about a rite of passage, and realising that the reality of the world does not match our expectations of it. Here, specifically, it is sexuality which is the theme: the speaker is appalled and repulsed by the reproductive cycle of frogs, which doesn’t quite tally with the view of nature offered by his teacher, Miss Walls. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.

Parallelism: the use of the same line structure. For example, likes one and two of stanza two as well as the structures of all the odd-numbered stanzas. Allan Ahlberg (5 June 1938) and Janet Ahlberg (21 October 1944 – 13 November 1994) , née Janet Hall, were a British married couple who created many children's books, including picture books that regularly appear at the top of most popular lists for public libraries. Whether it’s Wordsworth recalling his schooldays in The Prelude, or Shakespeare’s Jaques describing the schoolboy ‘creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school’, poets have often written about school, whether fondly or critically, from the teacher’s or the pupil’s perspective. Here are ten of the finest poems about school and schooldays, teachers and pupils, classrooms and chalkboards. Allan Ahlberg's collection of witty and comical poems about the trials and tribulations of being at school is superb. Although some of the content is pretty dated, having been written in 1983, the comedy contained within still manages to produce laughter in the classroom. Children of all ages can relate to the various aspects of school life such as friendship, breaking up and making up, misbehaving and getting into trouble, and mean and unsympathetic teachers.