wakelet | Expect the Miraculous

We have many traditions at Barrow. One of the traditions that I began is our Poem In Your Pocket Day. This event started off small back in 2008. I encouraged everyone in the school to carry poems in their pockets on a certain day in April and a few classes signed up to come to the library to share poetry into a microphone. Over time this event grew into a multi-day event where every class in the school comes to the library, which is decorated like a poetry cafe, and each student gets to share an original or favorite poem into the microphone. We also broadcast our poetry readings in multiple ways. As technology changes, our way of streaming our readings changes too.

Last year, we were still figuring out virtual learning so we used Flipgrid to share our poetry rather than having every class or student participate. This year, we decided to bring this event back with a few modifications for safety. We still have one class at each grade level that is virtual. We have 25 in-person homerooms. This stretched our event to 3 days. I scheduled a 20-minute slot for each class and teachers helped students prepare poems to read. Many students had already written poems as part of their writing workshops.

For virtual students, I created a video to show them how they might make their own “poetry cafe” at home since they wouldn’t be in our library.

For in-person students, I setup chairs in the library that were spaced out. In the past, we’ve sat at decorated tables or on shared cushions, but this year I felt spaced chairs was safer. For decorations, I pretty much pulled out what I could easily grab which meant decor from multiple seasons. I decided the theme was “poetry year round” since poetry can be celebrated anytime. We had moving snowflakes on the ceiling, flower lights around the board, lanterns, vases of flowers, colorful tablecloths, a READ pumpkin, and a beach towel. Our microphone had fabrics attached and a fabric backdrop with lights.

Whether virtual or in-person, students took turns sharing poetry into the microphone and we celebrated each poem with snaps and quiet claps. It’s a great opportunity for students to have a short moment in the spotlight and a space to be heard. Some students opted not to share, and no one was forced to come to the microphone if they didn’t want to. As students left, they received a bookmark with words like: “think”, “design”, “create”, “be kind”, “be strong”, and more.

I loved seeing our virtual students and teachers really getting into the poetry cafe idea. Many wore special hats or clothes and many created a backdrop to share in front one. One student even replicated our library microphone with fabrics.

Since families aren’t coming into the building right now, I shared a Zoom link for every poetry session. I also recorded the sessions and loaded them to Youtube for families to watch later. Families who joined live via Zoom were on the screen for students to see.

I put all of our videos into a Wakelet so anyone can enjoy our 3 days of poetry readings. We did have a power outage in the midst of the last day, so a few classes weren’t recorded as we scrambled to move forward with our schedule.

How do you celebrate poetry?

April is poetry month and April 22 is Earth Day. Since our 3rd grade studies environmental standards in the 4th quarter, I decided to weave all of these things together using Wakelet, Padlet, and Capstone Connect. Currently, most of our school is attending in-person but we have one class at each grade level that is virtual. I’ve been planning lessons and projects for virtual instruction and then modifying them with activities we can also do in-person for our in-person classes. I find Wakelet one of the easiest ways to curate content in a sequential or choice-board format. I can easily share the Wakelet in Google Classroom for students to quickly access once the opening part of the lesson is complete.

Our 3rd grade standard is S3L2. Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information about the effects of pollution (air, land, and water) and humans on the environment. I decided to open our lesson with a short and powerful read aloud The Mess that We Made by Michelle Lord & Julia Blattman. This book has text that repeats and builds on each page to show how one choice environmental choice can snowball to impacts many aspects of our environment. It also has a great message of how we can be the ones to turn pollution around and save our Earth.

Once we read and discussed the book, I set the idea of recycling or reusing by talking about discarded library books. I showed books that were falling apart beyond repair and how I often tear pages from these books to save for projects during the year. I specifically chose some discarded books that featured animals or the world so that students could use the pages to create blackout poetry as a way to reuse instead of throwing away.

To setup our blackout poetry work session, we watched this short video from Austin Kleon.

Since the video offers a visual with a musical background, I could add in a few things about blackout poetry while the video was playing.

I also offered students the option of creating a digital blackout poem. This was especially helpful for our virtual students, but many of our in-person students chose this option too. We used an online poetry maker. Side note: This site was blocked in my district so I had to request that it be unblocked for this project. It has 3 texts already available to choose from so I used the Alice In Wonderland text to model making a blackout poem. My tip for students was to start with a noun and then find words along the way that described or connected with that noun. This was the poem I created in my demo.

The online generator lets you easily select the words you want, blackout the rest, render the text, and save as an image.

It even has a custom text box where you can copy and paste your own words. This is where I pulled in articles from PebbleGo via my subscription to Capstone Connect, an online hub that allows you to search by titles or standards across PebbleGo, PebbleGoNext, and Capstone Interactive Library. For our blackout poetry, I searched by our state 3rd grade science environmental standards and selected several articles from PebbleGo & PebbleGoNext that students could read and then copy and paste chunks of text into the custom text box of the poetry maker.

I also created a Padlet where students could upload their digital blackout poems or take a picture of their paper blackout poetry.

Once students finished with poetry, they could read or listen to the many interactive ebooks from Capstone Interactive library that that I included on the Wakelet. These books were also found thanks to the standards search in Capstone Connect.

To close our time, I added an exit ticket where students could share what they learned about helping the environment, what they liked about the lesson, and what didn’t really work well for them.

This lesson was a lot of fun and students were engaged the whole time. It was hard to finish it all in one session, so the classroom teachers will continue the lesson in the classroom. That’s another great thing about having everything in Wakelet. It’s a lot of resources, but it’s easy to share and continue using for future work sessions.

If you’re curious about Capstone Connect or how I have been using Wakelet to curate resources for grade level projects, I’ll be presenting a webinar on April 21 from 4:30-5:15PM CT. You can register here. Even if you can’t attend in person, you can reference the recording later. I’ll share more about this poetry project, some projects from the past couple of months, and something I’m setting up for the summer. Plus you’ll have a chance to ask some questions too.