April 28, 2014 by plemmonsa

Exploring Civil Rights through Blackout and Magnetic Poetry

5^th grade has a massive social studies curriculum. It spans from the civil war all the way up to the present. One of the things that they have been doing for the past 2 years that I love is using Christopher Paul Curtis’s books to tie in to the curriculum. They start with Elijah of Buxton, move to Bud Not Buddy, and finish with the Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963.

The civil rights movement is where they have been spending a lot of time recently, so the teacher emailed me to see what we might do in the library to focus on this time period in her language arts class. The standards they are working on are:

SS5H8 The student will describe the importance of key people, events, and developments between 1950-1975.

b. Explain the key events and people of the Civil Rights movement; include Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and civil rights activities of Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Since it’s poetry month, I wanted to pull poetry into our time together, and I knew that 5^th graders would be able to handle some complex text and concepts.

Just like with 3^rd grade, we read Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles, but their background information was much deeper than what 3^rd graders knew. They had connections and stories to share about the riots and peaceful marches that took place during the civil rights movement. It was the perfect opportunity for me to also pull in Revolution by Deborah Wiles. This book doesn’t publish until May 27^th, but I have an advance reader’s copy from the Texas Library Association Conference. I was able to show them some of the speeches, music, advertisements, etc from the time period to accompany the picture book, Freedom Summer.

For poetry, the 5^th graders created 2 kinds of found poetry. They used the Word Mover app on the iPad to create magnetic poetry. The app has a word bank that is words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. They also used pages from Freedom Summer and a couple of pages from Revolution to create blackout poetry.

This time for blackout poetry, we used the New York Times interactive site to create blackout poetry together. The site makes it very easy to select & deselect words from articles to create 15-word blackout poems. We did an example together on the board. The teacher also helped demonstrate how to mark words on their own paper by putting boxes around words in the NY Times article on the board.

We found that a good first step for students in making blackout poetry is to read or skim the page and then put boxes around words or phrases that stand out. Once you are sure of the words you want in your poem, then you blackout the rest of the page. Modeling this on the board was important today. We had very few students in 3 classes who needed to start over.

I randomly gave students pages from the books and they started the process. For the most part, it was a very quiet process. Students methodically chose their words and then quietly shared their work at their tables. A few students paired up to help each other decide on words and phrases.

As students finished their blackout poems, they grabbed an iPad and created their Word Mover poems. Just like with 2^nd grade, most students arranged their words into solid sentences rather than shaping them up like a poem. If time allowed, I conference with students and they went back into their poem to shape it into line breaks.

Almost every poem was a reflective synthesis of student understanding about events of the civil rights movement and freedom summer. Some students had some humorous twists to their poems, but most were solemn, serious, and reflective.

Take a look at their gallery. Just like Revolution immerses us in the time period through story, music, advertisements, speeches, and other documentary pieces, the student poetry immersed us in the positive and negative feelings of the civil rights movement and freedom summer through multiple perspectives.

April 24, 2014 by plemmonsa

Digital Magnetic Poetry with the Word Mover App

We’ve been having a lot of fun with found poetry during poetry month. We started with book spine poems, and we will try some blackout poems very soon. Today we explored magnetic poetry. When students were making book spine poems, there were several times that they really wanted to move one or two words around or there was one word that was missing that they really wanted to add. Magnetic poetry gave them so much more flexibility in that aspect.

Mrs. Ramseyer’s 2nd grade was the first class to try this poetry this year. We started by using the nature poetry on the magnetic poetry website. I liked doing this type of poetry after book spine because students quickly saw that they really had to think about how to put groups of words together that made sense. Books already had the words put together and students just had to decide which books and what order. Magnetic poetry requires students to start with a bank of words and somehow make sense out of them. We played around on the board trying to put groups of words together. We knew that we could throw words back into the bank if we didn’t need them. Students had many ideas of what should go together, which meant many disagreements as well. This was a great type of poetry to do alone.

I showed students the Word Mover app on the iPad, which essentially is like magnetic poetry. Word Mover has an iPad and android version and comes to us from Read Write Think. There are a few options. Students can choose a word bank or choose from several famous speeches and songs that can be remixed into a poem. There is also an option to make your own words, but I discouraged students from starting with the “my own words” category since that would stray from the idea of found poetry. What we all loved was that you could add any word no matter which word bank you chose.

Once students selected their word bank, they started dragging words onto the work space and arranging them. Any words could go into the trash can to put them back in the bank. Students could shuffle the words in the word bank or even get a bank of new words.

The teacher and I wandered around the media center chatting with students about what they were thinking. As with any kind of writing, some students were naturals at this kind of poetry while others had to start over a few times. Some of the students who chose speeches and songs like America the Beautiful and I Have a Dream had a hard time remixing rather than just copying the original.

Mrs. Ramseyer and I both noticed that students were writing their poetry as if it was one long sentence or paragraph. Once students told us “I’m done”, we asked them to read their poem aloud. As we heard them pause in their reading, we suggested that those pauses might be where their line breaks should go. Students spent a bit of time rearranging their poem so that it was in lines that naturally flowed for the reader.

If time allowed, students chose a background and added a title to their poem. Some students even figured out that you could change the color and font of the words.

Once poems were done, students saved them to the camera roll on the iPads so that you could enjoy them here.

April 9, 2013 by plemmonsa

Found Poetry with the Word Mover App

I always love collaborating with Ms. Hocking in Kindergarten. A few weeks ago, she shared a great iPad app by Read Write Think called Word Mover. It’s basically a magnetic poetry app. You can choose from a word bank or from several famous works such as the I have a Dream speech and America the Beautiful. In each word bank, you can also add your own words, change the font, and the color. You can also choose from several backgrounds to put behind your poem. Students drag the words in any order that they want to create their poem just like you would do with magnetic poetry on the fridge. Students give their poem a title and save it to the camera roll. From there, you can use the image however you want. Ms. Hocking plans to display the poems on her smart board during April.

This was a great tie-in to found poetry. We also talked about how you could walk the halls f the school and borrow words from the student work that is hanging on the walls in order to write a new poem. The Kindergarten class used this tool without a lot of instruction. Ms. Hocking and I walked around and helped students with questions. The most common help needed was being able to read one of the words. They really didn’t have problems using the technology.

Take a look at the poetry gallery below.