For more than a decade The Poetry Trust ran creative workshops for teachers each term. This extensive experience has been condensed into a user-friendly new handbook - The Poetry Toolkit. This offers foolproof recipes for teaching poetry in the classroom and is available free as either a printed booklet or PDFdownload.

This toolkit provides fun, adaptable, tried-and-tested exercises to get young people - and indeed people of any age - confidently writing poetry. Primary and secondary school teachers who kept on coming to our workshops have repeatedly said what a revelation it was to try writing themselves - putting themselves in the position of their pupils. Dip into the toolkit which is based on direct contributions from leading poet-tutors - including Mandy Coe, Peter Sansom, Jackie Wills and Anthony Wilson - for warm-ups and group exercises based on poem-jigsaws, photographs, eavesdropping and telling lies! Printed copies of the toolkit were sent to all Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk schools who participated in the workshops.

Teachers Workshops were held most recently in Suffolk in March 2009. They were led by Jane Anderson, The Poetry Trust’s Learning & Outreach expert. Jane is a published poet who taught Secondary English for over twenty years. She has an MA in Creative Writing and now works in a variety of education settings running poetry workshops for pupils and teachers.

These workshops provided examples of exercises to take back to the classroom. They also offered the first-hand experience and buzz of writing and the space to consider how poetry can help pupils use language more effectively, in literacy and English and across the curriculum. These sessions were suitable for teachers from all key stages.

Really inspiring and gently informative: great for self-development as well as professional ideas.

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Additional support from
Inclusive School Improvement Service

Grateful thanks to the Ernest Cook Trust and the Barbara Whatmore Trust for supporting the Teachers Workshops