The Wonderful World of Tim Burton

Using poetry in class is a great way to focus on 

• rhyming words
• intonation
• sentence stress
• word stress
• phonemes
• vocabulary

etc....

I'd like to suggest some fun ways to use poetry in the classroom and in this post I'll be focusing on the work of Tim Burton (1958), American film director, producer, artist, writer, and animator. He is best known for his dark, gothic, macabre, and quirky horror and fantasy films such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie, and for blockbusters such as Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Batman, its first sequel Batman Returns,Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland.  

(Source - Wikipedia)

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) is a musical fantasy-comedy film which tells the story of Jack Skellington, a being from "Halloween Town" who opens a portal to "Christmas Town" and decides to celebrate the holiday, with some dastardly and comical consequences. It's based on the original poem written by Tim Burton in 1982, while he was working as an animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Here's a link to an animated version of the poem, narrated by Christopher Lee. Underneath you'll find a copy of the text, with all the rhyming words highlighted and potentially tricky vocabulary underlined. 

The Nightmare before Christmas Full text

Another fun resource I've used with my learners is Burton's  The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and other stories - a brilliantly bizarre collection of illustrated tales involving a cast of misunderstood outcasts, all struggling to find love and acceptance in their cruel worlds.

My personal favourites are Robot Boy, Toxic Boy and The Girl with Many Eyes. 

There are lots of creative ways you can use poems in the classroom. Here are a few ideas:

• read aloud together focusing on rhythm and intonation
• gapfill exercise (cloze)
• matching game with rhyming words (before or after reading)
• sort words according to same sound in the phonemic chart (e.g. thunder, wonder, sun)
• students decide which words are stressed then listen and check
• focus on weak forms 
• mix up the lines and ask students to rearrange them
• dictogloss technique  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictogloss

Click here for the poems (with illustrations):

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy

and find out more about Tim Burton here:

http://www.timburton.com/

Stay tuned for more posts on using poetry in the English Language classroom!