Ruru - Night Hunter

We have been exploring the picture book “Night Hunter” by Katie Furze and Ned Barraud.  We turned our pieces of writing into a piece of poetry.  The poem had to look, feel and read like a poem.   This was a real brain teaser and a challenge for us to think outside the box !  

Our focus was building our Oral Language, Reading and Writing for effect. We were working on identifying and responding to language features like strong verbs, alliteration, and onomatopoeia that we could find in this picture book. We made connections and added as we went.

By reading this story, we were able to collect vocabulary and dissect simple sentence structures to create a poem. We looked at some different pieces of poetry that illustrated different text structure. In plain language it had to look and sound poetic. We looked carefully at the language features that enhanced the writing and we talked about and described how we could communicate meaning figuratively, in a way that made sense for our different ages and stages.

How did we explain this to the students ? We used the words - "showing not telling" or inferencing. We made links to our reading.

For some students not having a 'set structure' like a simple or a compound sentence or paragraphing really caused some confusion. We gave a simple structure as a scaffold for each part of our poem that supported what we were trying to achieve.

Our poems had to:

1. describe the night.
2. describe the ruru flying & hunting.
3. describe the animal being hunted.
4. describe the emotion or suspense in the final 'catch'.
5. a conclusion that bought the reader back to a peaceful and satisfying conclusion.

The first step for the students was to inject themselves into a dark night. They had to connect with the story and what they knew about Ruru. We used lots of discussion and 'piggy backing' - sharing of ideas. Our writing ideas floated on our sea of talk to start with.

The students set off, pencil in hand to go for it. From what we managed to record we either, added more, edited by removing all the 'weasel words' and insignificant detail or we edited by adding interesting vocabulary or missed details that would help paint the picture in the readers mind.

Here are some examples from different ages and stages.