4/2/2009 - Media opportunity: Verse case scenario

Penrith library will host one of 5 regional heats next week in a BBC poetry recital competition for 7-11 year olds.

The library will be the venue for the Off By Heart regional heat on Wednesday 11 February from 2.30pm to 4.30pm. 

Off By Heart is a new BBC competition to encourage primary school pupils to engage with learning and reciting poetry. Every primary school in the UK has been able to nominate one child aged 7 to 11 to take part.

The eventual winner will be crowned UK Poetry Recital Champion at the grand finale in April 2009, which will be hosted by Jeremy Paxman at the The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival and eventually broadcast in a 90-minute programme on BBC2.

There will be 16 school children from Cumbria taking part in next week's regional heat. Each has already been crowned poetry recital champion of their own school.

As well as the poetry recital competition, the school champions will also be able to take part in an exciting literary workshop to explore and engage with poetry. 

All of the participants in the regional will win the following prizes:

- A certificate acknowledging their participation as school champions.

- Special goodies to take home.

- A prize for the heat winner 

The eventual winner of the UK contest will have to show that they not only understand the poems in question, but they will have to prove they can perform them too.

Pupils will recite one of the following well known poems off by heart:

Alligator - Grace Nichols

The Way Through The Woods - Rudyard Kipling The Pig - Roald Dahl Daffodils - Wiilliam Wordsworth The Owl and The Pussycat - Edward Lear Leisure - W H Davies Talking Turkeys - Benjamin Zephaniah Matilda - Hilaire Belloc The Tyger - William Blake A Red, Red Rose - Robbie Burns The Listeners - Walter de la Mare The Walrus and The Carpenter - Lewis Carroll The King’s Breakfast - AA Milne

McCavity: The Mystery Cat - TS Eliot

The Lake Isle of Innisfree - WB Yeats

How to learn verse

1. Read the poem to yourself.

2. Now read the first line of the poem out loud. Take your eyes from the page and immediately say the line again. Glance back to make sure you got it right. If you made a mistake, try again. Now do the same with the second line. Repeat the procedure for every line in the poem.

3. Go back to the beginning. This time, read the first two lines out loud, look away and repeat them aloud. Check. If you made a mistake, try again. Now move on to the next two lines, going through the whole poem two lines at a time.

4. Repeat the process three lines at a time, then four lines at a time, then five and then six. By the sixth pass, no matter how long the poem, you will have it memorised.

5. Recite the whole poem just before you go to bed at night.

6. Crucial: stop thinking about the poem. Your sleeping mind is very important for memory.

7. The next day, you should find (after a glance at the first line to bump-start your memory) that you can recite the whole poem. 

ENDS

Media enquiries to Gareth Cosslett, News Manager on 01228 226332