Half-Past Two Poem Lesson - U A Fanthorpe

Identify and define literary devices used in the poem, including portmanteau, personification, and oxymoron.

Analyse how Fanthorpe's language and structure choices convey a child's confused perception of time.

Construct a PETAL (Point, Evidence, Technique, Analysis, Link) paragraph that supports a claim about the poem with textual evidence.

Evaluate the poem's tone and justify that evaluation using quotations from the text.

Use the Think-Pair-Share starter about punishment and behaviour to activate prior thinking before revealing the poem's subject.

Have students underline emotive language directly on their own copy during the tone-analysis task before comparing to the slide's model answer.

Work through the stanza-by-stanza language questions in pairs, then regroup for the whole-class structure questions about stanza count, rhyme, and beat.

Assign the extended-response question on childhood and time perception as homework after the in-class PETAL paragraph practice.

Poetic device identification — students define and locate portmanteau words, personification, and oxymoron within the poem's stanzas.

Close textual analysis — students answer content, language, and structure questions tied to specific quoted lines from each stanza.

Analytical paragraph writing — students build a PETAL-structured paragraph using point, evidence, technique, analysis, and link.

Author context research — students learn about U.A. Fanthorpe's biography and how it may inform the poem's narrator.