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.

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.

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.

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