The Colour Poem Global Twitter Project #5 (Week 5): BLUE poems with Grade 2

We have joined the Colour poem Global project started by Linda Yollis http://goo.gl/YtbFkg.   The Grade 2s did BLUE Poems today. The Grade 2s were excited about doing blue poems. They are enjoying this global project.

Skills learned

We used PowerPoint and I we learned the following skills:

• Using commas between words and leave a space after a comma
• Centring the words to make it look like a poem
• Using Google Images to find images
• Formatting the background and selecting a matching colour

Creating the poem
We had a little revision lesson on nouns (naming words), verbs (doing words) and adjectives (describing words) first on the mat. I could see their teacher had been through this with them. First we thought of blue things that we love (nouns). Then we tried to describe them using adjectives. We talked about that those things they had chosen can do (verbs). We ended with a noun.  These came out in a diamond shape.  Here is the format:

Noun

Adjective, Adjective

Verb, Verb, Verb

Noun

Examples

My evaluation of the lesson
The class enjoyed the lesson and I enjoyed the lesson as well.  I was pleased to see how they had caught on about nouns, verbs and adjectives.

The Colour Poem Global Twitter Project #4 (Week 4) GREEN poems with Grade 1

We have joined the Colour poem Global project started by Linda Yollis  http://goo.gl/YtbFkg. The Grade 1s did Green Poems today. The learners are loving this project. They always want to see what other classes have done. I had a student teacher helping me today so I managed to get a fairly complicated lesson done with her help.

Skills learned
We used PowerPoint and I managed to teach them the following skills:

• Adding a colour to the background 
• Finding images in Google Chrome 
• Adding an image by right-clicking and choosing ‘Çopy Image’ 
• Formatting the background to a shade of green

Creating the poem
In order to create the poem we had a discussion about the colour green first on the mat. Each one chose something green to write about. Then when we started on the PowerPoint template our format was as follows:

• Start with a question 
• Write three short sentences about the item they chose 
• Write one final statement about the item

Examples
The lesson went well. Here are a few examples:

My evaluation of the lesson
I loved the different shades of green that emerged. I always tell them that in computer lessons we don’t worry about spelling – we just write and when I walk around I’ll show them how to correct any spelling errors.  I was amazed how well the Grade 1s did in this lesson thanks to my co-helper!

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.

The Colour Poem Global Twitter Project #3 (Week 2): ORANGE poems with Grade 3

We have joined the Colour poem Global project started by Linda Yollis  http://goo.gl/YtbFkg.  The Grade 3s did Orange Poems today as this is the Orange week. What I love about Global projects like these is that the students also enjoy them and participate fully. They love looking at the Twitter hashtag to see what other learners from other countries have written.

Skills learned
We used PowerPoint and we learned the following skills:

• After creating the poem, centring the words to make it look like a poem 
• Using Google Images to find many orange images 
• Formatting the background and selecting a matching colour
• Keeping to a diamond shape and using nouns, adjectives and adverbs

Creating the poem
We decided to do a diamond-shaped 9-lined poem all related to the orange pictures they had selected,  with the format of:
One word
Two words
Three words
Four words
Five words
Four words
Three words
Two words
One word

Examples
Here are some examples:


My evaluation of the lessonEveryone got finished in this lesson. However sme left out the middle line of five words. It was a fun lesson with everyone thinking around orange. The learners loved it.

The Colour Poem Global Twitter Project #2 (Week 1) RED poems with Grade 2

We have joined the Colour poem Global project started by Linda Yollis.  The Grade 2s did Red Poems today. What I love about Global projects like these is that the students also enjoy them and participate fully.

Skills learned
We used PowerPoint and I we learned the following skills:

• Writing a poem in a triangle shape
• Adding a triangle shape to the poem and sending it to the back
• Formatting the shape and selecting red
• Using Google Images to find a red image

Creating the poem
I brought a number of red items to school and we took turns, on the mat, examining them and trying to describe them. We chose six of them to write about and had to keep to the triangle shape to write the poem. Once the poem was written we selected a triangle shape and place it over the poem. We sent it to the back.

Examples
Here are some examples:

Evaluation
Not everybody finished in time, but the class enjoyed the lesson.

The Colour Poem Global Twitter Project #1 (Week 1): RED poems with Grade 1

I met Linda Yollis at the New York Google Teacher Academy – and since I had been a great fan of her blog up till then meeting her in person was a great highlight! When I noticed recently that she had started a Colour poem Global Twitter project I was very keen to join http://goo.gl/YtbFkg.

The goal of the project
The object of this collaborative project is to share original poems, create colourful digital images, and publish through classroom Twitter accounts using the hashtag #clrpoem! Each week a colour of the visible spectrum will be showcased! We’ll be following the colour spectrum ROY G BIV (red-orange-yellow-green-blue-*indigo-violet) 

Step 1: Create a class Twitter account
I set this up, after much thought as @ICTclasstweets:

Step 2: Get busy with Week 1 of the project
Mrs Yollis’ instructions: “This week, we are seeing RED! Shoot a photo of something red, compose a little poetry to complement the photo, and tweet it out! Remember, use the hashtag #clrpoem”. I thought I would involve my Grade 1, Grade 2 and Grade 3 students in this project.

Step 3: Take a look at the hashtag #clrpoem
The Grade 1s and 2s loved looking through this hashtag and reading the tweets about red poems.

Step 4: Get started with Red Poems from Grade 1
I thought we would start with Grade 1 doing the colour RED. We did our poems during ICT class using Microsoft Paint. It worked really well as we were able to save these as JPEGs immediately.


I thought I would tweet Mika’s using the #clrpoem hashtag!

Evaluation
This was quite a mission with Grade 1s! We did this in steps:

• We read other people's poems first on the  #clrpoem hashtag and discussed the images.  
• We learned how to open Google Images using Chrome and we searched for red items. They pasted their image into Paint.
• We used the Text option and started writing. I walked around helping them to spell words.
• We saved the work.
• We got finished! (I wondered if we would)