Aiming High?
Additional Study Materials
Unseen Poetry

Give yourself no more than 30 minutes to do this task. We will have an additional follow up Intervention session on this on the first Wednesday back at lunchtime in my classroom 1.15-1.45 where we will spend 30 minutes reviewing the poem and you will be able to check your understanding.

I will be doing more of these types of Interventions where part a will be on the blog, and you will arrive to the Intervention session for the follow up.

Read the poem and consider it carefully. Look for its main ideas, language features, consider the effects of the language features used and write down 10 statements showing your consideration of the above and which show your interpretation of the poem.
For example:

One of the main ideas present in the poem is that...
One techniques present in the poem is the use of...we seen this in the line: "..." The effect of this is to...

Do not research the poem. Only write down your own thought (you will not be able to research the unseen poem in the exam).

Don't worry if you 'don't get it', get what you can from it. No matter how small you feel your understanding of it is.

AFTERNOONS (by Philip Larkin)
Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.