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English Literature KS3 / GCSE: 'Praise Song for My Mother' by Grace Nichols (analysis)

Grace Nichols talks about her poem, 'Praise Song for my Mother'.

Following brief visual images of Guyana, she explores how the poem reflects her family life, cultural background and approach to writing poetry. Nichols reads extracts from the poem to the accompaniment of ambient guitar music and wave sounds.

This is from the 成人论坛 series, Poets in Person.

Teacher Notes

This short film could be used to explore the metaphors of motherhood employed in the poem.

In pairs students could choose one metaphor from the poem and write it in the middle of a plain piece of paper.

Give your students ten minutes to analyse and explore the metaphor in note form, in as much detail as possible; listing as many different interpretations of the words and image as they can.

This is an exercise called 'saying a lot, about a little'.

Curriculum Notes

This short film will be relevant for teaching English literature at KS3 and KS4/GCSE in England and Northern Ireland. Also English language at KS3 and English literature at GCSE in Wales.

This topic appears in OCR, Edexcel, AQA, WJEC in England and Wales and CCEA GCSE in Northern Ireland.

More from the series: Poets in Person

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