Skip to main content

Blackout Poetry for National Poetry Month




April is National Poetry Month. I use to love teaching about poetry but like most teachers I typically covered the same types of poems all the time. A few years ago I ran into a "new" (to me) type of poetry called Blackout Poetry created by Austin Kleon (there are several videos of him creating poems on YouTube) and I wanted to give it a try.

The idea is to "find" words within other peoples writing and create a poem using the words that are already on the paper (and blacking out the words you don't need). If you do a Google search most people use newspapers (and we did too). 

As a class we had created "found" poems using cut outs from magazines so I thought this would be a nice, and different, extension of that activity. I was wrong. :)

It didn't go as planned.  In hindsight what I thought was going to be easy was a little to abstract for children (fourth graders). On the plus side they took the project to mean summarize the main points of the article so it wasn't a completely wasted lesson (and the technique can certainly be used to summarize an article).

My problem was my enthusiasm was there but I didn't really give a good explanation...nor did I create a gradual release model (I was more like... "Look how fun this is! Lets try it!"). I also found that the newspaper print was too small and the text too complex.

I'm trying to get some of my teacher friends to give it a try (because it is still cool!) and came across this BLOG POST from a teacher who did it with 2nd graders. I also came across this PRESENTATION that goes over the five basic rules of how to get started. The 2nd grade teacher wisely used larger print text and she tied it into their study of animals. She included pictures of the process.

Of course as a technology coach I was thinking that teachers can give students their text via Edmodo or Google Classroom and then students could use their Notability app to do the circling and blacking out. Teachers can get the text from kid friendly sites and blow up the font before sharing (or printing) with students. 

In the sample below I took an article about jellyfish from the Newsela site and copied and pasted it to a Word document (on the site I changed the lexile range to a second grade level to make it less wordy). I saved it as a PDF and uploaded it to Edmodo. I opened it on my iPad in Notability and started to comb through the words until I found something I liked. 




If you have tried Blackout Poetry with elementary students let me know how it went!



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Rock Cycle Activity

Today I got to spend the day with a 3rd grade science teacher doing a rock cycle activity. She had asked for help a couple of weekends ago to find some engaging rock cycle activities for her students. I quickly did a Pinterest search and came up with a link to a middle school blog where they featured a fun looking rock cycle station activity. That website took me to the originating activity site - Illinois State Museum Geology Online and their Ride the Rock Cycle activity . I read through it and felt it was doable for third graders (although I was a little nervous about the cartooning). I offered my help and we put together the activity. The kids did it WONDERFULLY. It was one of those lesson you wish was observed (but of course never is :) They are on an alternating science schedule so she only had two of the four classes today but it was a good sampling of children. She had one class that had a high portion of struggling learners and the second class had a high