Lake District National Park

Coming soon to a Year 7 lesson near you. Tony Walsh on the Lake District...

Poetry by Tony Walsh 

We have collaborated with northern poet Tony Walsh to create this unique short film, ‘Reflecting On The Lakes’. The unique film and poem celebrates what it’s like to live, work and love the National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site, and will inspire viewers to help us protect and care for this truly special place. The film sets out to shine a light on the real Lake District; celebrating all there is to love about the National Park, and declares: ‘it’s where farming shaped the landscape and where landscape shaped our lives, it’s now honoured by UNESCO with a badge we’ll wear with pride'. ‘Reflecting On The Lakes’, features scenes from across the Lake District which form the backdrop to a passionate piece of poetry written and performed by leading spoken word poet, Tony Walsh.

Mr. Parkinson's Fenland Poem

I entered a poem in the Fenland Reed Poetry Competition earlier in the year. I wrote about the Ordnance Survey's mapping of the Fens in the 1920s... and the problem of mapping such a fluid and protean landscape as the Fens... It's a bit clunky, but I enjoyed writing it....

I was really pleased that my poem was 'Commended' by the judge. 

Why not try writing your own Fenland poem...

Six Inches to the Fenland Mile by GeoBlogs on Scribd

Landscape Haiku

A haiku is a Japanese form of poetry.
It is a short verse form.
You are limited to a few syllables. A syllable is a part of a word which has a specific sound, so 'sound' has one syllable, but 'syllable' has three syllables.
We are going to use a 17 syllable form.
You can't use any more or less than 17 syllables.

You should write a three line poem.
You could use your syllables like this: 5-5-7 or 5-7-5.

e.g.
Look at the picture below, taken in the Fens close to Ely a few months ago.

Identify one aspect of the landscape that you are going to try to capture.

A haiku tries to tell a story, paint a picture or capture a moment. 

It doesn't have enough syllables to fully describe everything in a complicated picture.
he
I'm going to focus on the rapeseed.
It's yellow.

Here are some possible first lines:

A field of yellow
Lemon coloured crops
Colour of the sun
Yellow plants growing
Brightly coloured fields

Now the background:

Pylons march across the fields
Draws the eye it is so bright
Dark shadows in the background
Glows brightly in the sunshine

And finish with the sky:

Blue skies and grey clouds.
Grey clouds float above
Looks like rain coming
Will it rain quite soon?

Create a PPT slide which has the poem on top of a nice, good quality landscape image.

Here's my finished poem: 

Aim for three different landscapes, each with a poem.

Remember this is geography, so focus on the landscape, weather, crops, mountains, clouds etc. that might be in your photos...

You should also complete the 'Question of Landscapes' sheet, from the book called 'Look at it this Way'.

Finally, you could use an app to create a combination of words and pictures. Here's one that I made using a tool called WordFoto.

Landscape Haiku Instructions

Haiku Sheet to Print