Poetry #1: Create book spine poems (Grade 7)

April is Poetry month and I have been doing poetry lessons with my various classes as a result.  I thought I would record these activities as blog posts. This particular activity called 'Book Spine' poetry was done with a Grade 7 class.

Background
Recently I read a post by Ken Nesbitt on the Poetry4kids blog on writing Book Spine Poetry  http://www.poetry4kids.com/blog/lessons/how-to-create-book-spine-poetry/ . This was quite a novel idea I thought. It seems that you get your students to arrange book titles and make a poem from them. For example, in Ken Nesbitt’s post a group of arranged books are shown as:


The resulting poem could be:

"Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!
Oh, The Places You’ll Go
Where the Wild Things Are”

My Spine Poetry idea with a Grade 7 technology class
I thought I might do the spine poetry lesson slightly differently. I would take a pile of books to school and let each student take five of them and arrange them carefully in spine order. They would take a photo of the books and then create their own spine poems from the words, adding their own words to the spine title words as well as, of course, a title. They could also take photos of their arrangement to illustrate their created poems

Applications to use
PC: camera, PowerPoint
iPad: camera; Keynote OR Write about this free
Android: camera, Google slides

The lesson
We used PowerPoint to record the poems and a digital camera to take the photos.  The lesson went very well and the students enjoyed creating poems in this novel way. They read out their poetry creations to the rest of the class.   I loved their creativity…

The results
Here are a few of the examples:

The next step
I encouraged them, as an optional activity,  to use their books at home to create spine poems and email them to me using their Google Apps accounts.