Useful Organisations No.52: Perform-a-Poem

Perform-a-Poem can be reached via the Poetry-Friendly Classroom website, a resource set up for teachers by Michael Rosen while he was Children’s Laureate:

www.childrenslaureate.org.uk/poetry-friendly-classroom

Perform-a-Poem, a unique poetry performance website for primary school children, encourages children to write, choose, perform, film and edit poems. Their poetry video performances can then be uploaded by their teachers, and browsed and enjoyed by children in other schools as well as families and friends. Perform-a-Poem imitates the style of social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube or MySpace, but at the same time follows national standards on e-safety procedure. It enables anyone to browse the pupils’ videos whilst guaranteeing anonymity to the pupil. It is a completely safe website for children to use. Only teachers with an LGfL username will be able to upload videos. Videos are tagged with a pupil’s first name and borough only. Teachers take responsibility for protecting children’s identities in video content. As they are the uploaders, teachers can also filter out any unsuitable content. The site contains extensive resources for teachers, written by teachers and other experts, on all aspects of using the site – writing poems, choosing poems to perform, performance skills, filming, editing and uploading. Pupils and their friends and families can search the site by title of poem, pupils’ borough or topic of poem.