Monday, April 26, 2010

Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words

I was first introduced to this book at CUWP. I've been wanting to use it ever since, and now that we are doing Poetry Out Loud, this is my big chance. We spent about half of a class period making word tickets. Word tickets means that the students had a big pile of magazines and newspapers from which they were supposed to choose interesting words. After they got their words, they cut them out and glued them onto carnival-type tickets.

I had every student choose ten nouns, ten verbs, and ten "others," so we had around 900 words or so by the time they had finished. Then everyone got 10-15 random words and used as many as they wanted to create phrases and images to inspire poetry. My students had a fantastic time choosing words (and it was very educational, too, as they spent a lot of time arguing and teaching each other which words were and were not nouns and verbs). I will post some of their best works here after I've gone over all of their portfolios.

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