Poe-tree

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Description

Behaviour at The Meadows Special School is particularly challenging, but one man thinks he can get the students to write poems with the help of trees.The Meadows, Co. Durham, is a mixed secondary school for 60 socially, educationally and behaviourally disturbed pupils. Many of them also have real problems with literacy. Andy Croft has been visiting the school for six years and has developed ways of including children with a wide range of academic ability, demanding behaviours and limited contact with the written word. But he can't always be sure his methodologies will work. This year the weeks residency and resulting poems and pictures focus on trees , not just literal trees, but a Secre-tree , a His-tree, and a Laver-tree , amongst others. The children enjoy wordplay and making visual representations of their poems, and describe some of their reasons for being here and their relationships to reading and writing. Y9 present their final piece in the girl's toilets.