Fair Flora

Here's me in full-flow of my inspiring teacher mode :)

When I joined the school some years back, one pupil mentioned that there was a creepy statue of a woman in the nearby woods and she had no nose (the statue, not the pupil - I could see her nose). For some reason it stuck in my head, and a few years later it came to mind and thought it would be a great idea to go find it and use it for a bit of creative writing. After a little asking around I discovered she had a name: Fair Flora (the statue, not the pupil - I knew her name) and so I did a little digging on the web. It turned up a few references about various legends/stories/tales, but one mentioned a poem called The Astrologer's Daughter that used Flora as a focus. Although published in 1800 and impossible to buy anywhere, I came across a scanned copy from the University of California Libraries.

Now I am not the biggest fan of older literature, but I gave it a good old read through and realised that this could be one hell of a unit of work to do with my class. As part of the curriculum they are to experience older texts, and I made sure I used a lot of drama to ensure that the language didn't turn any of them off. After all, a 20-page 200-year-old poem isn't the most exciting thing to introduce to a bunch of 9-11 year olds is it?!?

I am not sure if it was the local aspect of the tale, the drama work or simply the cracking tale itself - but they LOVED it. We were fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to be included in a project to bring film-making to schools, and I worked with the assigned director to focus the project on the tale once we'd spent a couple of weeks studying it. My Year 6 of the time made an amazing mini-documentary about the statue/tale.

Although the current government decided to cut the funding for the film project country-wide a couple of years back, it hasn't stopped my current class from engaging with the poem as I have revisited the tale. After two weeks doing various things with the text, I took them up to the woods to see the statue and complete the read through.

I loved it. Teacher-tingly-tastic it was.