Fifth graders at PS 124 created “List” or “Catalog” poetry while learning to blog, and produced video representations of poems generated through this project.
Poetry Unit and Blogged List Poems
Students read There was a Child Went Forth by Walt Whitman, learned about the poet and his image-rich style of writing, and responded to 4 themes within the poem during directed free-writing sessions.
Students then worked with their classroom teachers and literacy coach to develop selected lines from their “free-writes” in a Whitmanesque style, then added them to the following blog posts as “Comments” creating a raw “List Poem” on each theme:
Remixing into Sequences
Students and teachers then worked on sequencing the lines in different ways to see how meaning is affected. Each student created a 5 line poem of their own from the list.
Video Production & Publishing
Students then produced video representations of their 5 line poems. To create the videos students recorded themselves reading aloud in iMovie, and added images downloaded from the Internet to add meaning to their words. A “works in progress” screening of the student video drafts was held where peers critiqued them using a rubric to analyze diction, image choice and editing style. Students then edited final drafts of the videos, which we were posted to the PS 124 website.
This project took place in 2008, and was updated in 2013.
The Media Spot 