Wednesday 8th July 2020 Our picture book this week is:

‘ The Promise’ by Nicola Davies – Illustrated by Laura Carlin

We live in the beautiful city of Oxford which is full of historic buildings and lush, green spaces. Nicola Davie, the author of our focus book: The Promise, deliberately chose a hard urban city for the setting of her story.

Your task today is to write a free verse poem describing an ugly city.

What is a free verse poem?

Free verse poems are like list poems - they do not follow a pattern and do not need to rhyme. List poems are made up of a mixture of individual words and longer phrases

All you have to do is to think of words or phrases to describe an ugly city. We use a repeating phrase at the start of each verse to help link the poem together

(the poem is usually 2 or 3 verses).

For example, we could use: 'In the ugly city' as our repeating phrase.

Here is an example of an opening verse:

In the ugly city,

People live in a blanket of darkness, with:

Grime,

Pollution,

Buildings crumbling

Without one single blade of grass.

Here is an example format for your verse: Repeating Phrase

Sentence

Word

Word

Word

Sentence

Here is a word bank to get you started. Use a thesaurus to find even more words to describe an urban setting.

Vocabulary to describe an urban city:

Pollution, grime, dust, dirt, smoke, spewed, graffiti, factories, smog, soot,

Derelict buildings, decay, crumbling, peeling, littered, worn, weathered, run-down, shabby, cracked, noisy.