Blackout Poetry & Book Spine Poetry

On May Day, how about a look back at April, National Poetry Month, when we celebrated by creating blackout poems and book spine poems. All of the seventh grade language arts classes passed through the library over three days to "write" poetry.

 Students also stacked library books into poems in a book spine activity. After students pulled books to use, poems began to emerge. Take a look below!

Celebrating National Poetry Month

As April is National Poetry Month, students in 7th grade language arts visited the library to "write" book spine poems and found poems. Students worked in pairs and individually to create poetry from fiction titles.

Just two days later, the same students returned to the library to "write" found poems. In this activity, students used pages from weeded fiction titles to create a poem. 

Celebrating National Poetry Month

Seventh grade language arts students have been into the library recently to celebrate poetry during National Poetry Month. They "wrote" poems during two different activities: book spine poetry and found poetry.

During our look at book spine poetry, students worked with partners to "write" poems using books mainly from the fiction collection. While the shelves looked "well loved" after the activity, it was definitely worth it!

Students came into the library later for another activity--found poetry. With two options for "writing," some students chose to extract words from a scene in an independent reading book, like this poem based on a scene from Divergent.

The second option students had to "write" a found poem was to choose only the words they wanted from a page from a weeded book. After looking at several examples, the creativity flowed!

Check out some of their work below:

Book Spine Poetry, Take 2!

After having small groups of students work to create spine label poems last week (see the earlier blog post further down this page), 7th grade language arts students were in today with last week's students serving as group leaders. Here are some students collecting books to use, as well as "drafting" their poems at tables:

And here are their results:

Claire, Anna, Haley

Morgan, Maleah, Emily, Jayson

Robert, Cesar, Alex

Nick, Vanessa, Jacob, Tate, Abby, Connor

Austin, Brianna, Reagan, James, Mara

Jordan, Zack, Trent, Ayden

Kalie, Morgan, Blair

Luke, Ryan, Ben, Caleb

Marissa, Alex, Rachel, Jacob

Lexi, Ben, Jacob, Mariam, Marcus

Lucas, Jacob, Trenton, Rebecca, Ellis

Blake, Jenna, Ben, Sara, Bethany

These two groups chose to put titles on their poems, and the poem "Adolf Hitler" even has stanza breaks!

Abby, Rylie, Kourtney

Izzy, Kara, Tanner, Keaton, Morgan

Mrs. Perkins and I even "wrote" our own poems!