Black it out!

Black it out!

Hi there, it’s Mrs. Cote again, Ms. Clerkin’s student teacher in the library.

So last month we did something pretty cool that I wanted to share with you.  In collaboration with both 8th grade ELA classroom teachers (thank you to Mrs. Russak-Smith and Mr. Campbell for inviting us into your classrooms!) and library teacher Ms. Clerkin, I taught a lesson about Blackout poetry.  Have you heard of it?

Here’s how it works—instead of writing a poem on a blank piece of paper from scratch, you use paper with words already on it.  The page with words on it is actually a discarded page from a book!  We used pages from the books Monster  (by Walter Dean Myers) and Esperanza Rising (by Pam Munoz Ryan).  You then “write” the poem by blacking out the words you DON’T want.  Your poem ends up being the words you did not blackout.

Next, once your poem is finished—you get creative!  Turn the words you don’t want into artwork!

Sounds simple, right?  It’s not!  It can be tricky since you can only use the words on your page.  Not only that, you need to choose words in the right order (or somehow connect the words in the right order).  However, once you get going it gets easier.

Take a look at these awesome examples from 8th grade students:

Pretty impressive, right? The students worked SO hard on these!For more examples, check out the displays I put up on the library bulletin boards for both clusters (3rd floor). Which one was your favorite? Did you connect more to the poem or the artwork? Or both together?