“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” – Robert Frost
April is National Poetry month and the perfect excuse to inspire your students with poetry no matter what subject you teach. Try posting a short poem on the board related to the topic of the day, such as the science haikus found @Sciencehaiku. Then give your students the mission to create their own poems that explore the topic more deeply. For example, they can create descriptive poems about animals and challenge their peers to guess the animal. They can create shape poems that explore science or math such as Bob Grumman’s long division poem. Start of with haikus or shorter poems that are easier for all students to create. Get them excited about animating their poems with digital tools and apps. See the slide presentation and bookmarks below for more ideas and resources.
Lesson Ideas
Here are a few lesson ideas I talked about during my presentation. Students can:
- create digital poetry eportfolios with free web tools and apps like Pinterest, Educlipper, or Livebinder
- share their poetry in digital books with web tools and apps like Storybird, LittleBirdTales, and Book Creator (IOS / Android) app
- evaluate poetry or create a class poetry presentation with Voicethread web tool and IOS app
- watch poetry videos like To This Day and create poems about bullying and bring these poems to life with iMovie, Animoto, Magisto, or other video creation tools and apps
- view animated text poetry like Television is a Drug then create their own animated text poetry presentations with multimedia tools like Powtoon, Muzy’s Word Play, 30 Hands,Tell Me About This (IOS), Narrable (IOS), and Fotobabble
- create magnetic poetry online
Resources
Here are a few more resources:
- Here’s the Youtube video of my webinar on creating poetry with digital tools.
- Here’s my poem, A Brown Cinderella, and lesson plans to go with it.
- The Poetry Idea Machine site walks students through each step in creating various forms of poetry.
- Poetry and Video Lesson Plans by Lesson Stream
- My webinar recording, slide presentation, and bookmarks for Teaching Poetry and Exploring Language Through Poetry
More Resources and Lesson Plans
Find many more ideas in my Pearltree bookmarks below. Click on the circle to make that resource appear.
Cultivate your interests with Pearltrees for Android
Challenge:
Try one of these tools or apps to get students interested in creating their own poems.
If you enjoyed these ideas, you may want to get your copy of The 30 Goals for Teachers or my $5.99 ebook, Learning to Go, which has digital/mobile activities for any device and editable/printable handouts and rubrics.
