The Teacher Toolbox

The Haunted House Poem – (click on this link to hear it)

In schools a poem is often ‘finished’ when  it is ‘published’. Publishing often involves ‘typing it up’ ensuring the text is centred, has a lovely font (that usually takes ages to select), has a nice piece of clip art to support the text and some sort of clip art border.

The poem is then either added to a wall display for a few weeks or put into a display folder to be sent home at the end of the term. Oh, and it often has a shiny sticker on it. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that there are many other creative ways to celebrate poetry.

The poem above was a joint construction between my son and I using this poetry scaffold from my website. The audio production has been done with the free software  Audacity and using sounds from Soundsnap.com

…and if you are wondering, the spooky voice was achieved by dropping the pitch of my voice by -20.

Miss Emily usually arises between 5am and 5:30 and it is my job to entertain her so the rest of the house can sleep. This morning we had a nice father/daughter moment when we composed a ‘fill in the gaps’ poem.

It needs to be noted that there was a lot of soft chuckles as we remembered some recent ‘terms of endearment’

My Dad Calls Me

My dad calls me Emily ThumTHucka

My dad calls me Missy

My dad calls me Hungry

My dad calls me Toad

My dad calls me Noisy Girl

My dad calls me Tonka Jim Jo

My dad calls me Sleepy Head

My dad calls me a pain in the bum.

My dad calls me Mischief

My dad calls me Miss Chatterbox

My dad calls me Thirsty

My dad calls me His Little Girl

My dad calls me Evil Incarnate

My dad calls me, ‘My Precious’

My dad calls me his Happy Shelia

My dad calls me his Baby.

I think my dad forgets my name sometimes.

.

I find using scaffolds a great way to introduce children to alternative ways of writing poetry and exploring creative process.

Here is my lastest scaffold

The Haunted House
_______________s,
_______________s
___________
Door ____________ slowly open,
______________ them in
a ____________,
a ____________,
a distant _(animal) (noise it makes)
_________,
________,
_____________ comes to a _____________ halt
and ____________!
________(sound) __________(sound) _________(sound)
Door ___________s shut
Only to open when the next unsuspecting
______________ comes along.

And you can explore the who process with your students at this page The Haunted House Sound Poem.

Enjoy

Writing ‘sound poems’ is always heaps of fun! Today I’ve started creating a word bank of examples of onomatopoeia and I need your help. I’ve put together a writable document that you can use as it exists but it would be appreciated if you added a few examples of your own to help me out. Please consider spending five minutes or so working on this for me. Example of Onomatopoeia

Today I’ve put together a scaffold for people wishing to experiment and be a little more creative in the publishing of poetry.

The poetry scaffold is a step by step guide to creating a verbal collage about each student. It encourages reflection and experimentation.

My son added a Wordle to his blog based on his blog tags and I made mine by ‘Pasting a heap of text’ into Wordle. We enjoyed playing with this tool and I think your students will also.

Have fun with Wordle

Adrian

PS Try performing this poem by readng it with a different volume and intonation for each word. Maybe even with a soundtrack behind it of Miles Davis

In the last couple of days a lot of the messages I’ve received relate to getting ready to go back to school in the US.

So in response here is an activity that I find works well in the first couple of days to get to know a bit more about the kids. NB I also do a ‘teacher version’ so they get to know just a little about me. I also find it helps the parents know which presents to buy at the end of the year. hehehehe

NB The second line is an anagram of my name from this anagram generator

BIG HINT – do this yourself without kids – I once had a child come out as ‘Romance Gel’

Adrian B
Cured in a Bar
Greenish eyes
Black hair
Two sisters
One brother… (who is no longer with us)
Loves skydiving
Abhors sardines
Adores the three toed sloth
Dislikes PE
Worships cricket
Fancies baklava
Loathes reality TV
Enjoys Radiohead
Detests Country Music
Needs the surf
Fears burning
Giggles occassionally
Sniggers seldomly
Reads Artemis Fowl
Watches Myth Busters
Loves ICTs
Hangs with Mr White
Wears jeans and a T-shirt
Drinks Wild Turkey & Dry
Plays Real Time Strategy Games
Dreams of a fulfilling career
Guitar playing freak!

You can find the full scaffold of this poem which is ready to ‘copy & paste’ to a word processor or blog article in the poetry section of my website in the self-esteem area.

Have fun with this one.

Adrian

Each year Hiroshima Day (August 6) just tends to slip under the radar in most schools. But I feel this day is so important that I spend the whole day on it in order to teach a little empathy.

One of the activities I do during the day is introduce ‘ecphrastic poetry’. This is a very powerful form that offers many opportunities to – ask questions, observe, interpret, infer, synthesize, hypothisise and, in this case, empathize.

Tonight I’ve put together a webpage of scaffolds that I’ve collected over the years that will help you on your way to adding ecphrastic poetry to your tool-box. I’ve also added a couple of teaching ideas and resources for Hiroshima Day.  NB I’ve added a .bmp file of the parchment and Peace Park Dome from the poem above for you to download, drop into an image editor and publish the poetry you create.

Adrian

My son recently had a birthday and his aunt, who is very, very pregnant, forgot his special day. She then wrote him a poem. Samuel and I had a play with the free software Audacity to create an audio file of the poem. We had heaps of fun and learnt a lot. Tonight I started experimenting with podomatic.com as a way of hosting his audio file and perhaps a way of hosting class podcasts.


Click here to get your own player.

cheers

Adrian B

You can get some really creative poetry results by using online magnetic poetry generating sites.

Check out my tips and tricks for using these magnetic poetry sites.

The students love them much more than you would imagine

Here is a poetry scaffold that you can use for the graduation ceremony of an elementary / primary school. Just take the poem and use it as a model and then ask the students to alter it to fit their school community. Add / Delete / Modify / find ‘better’ words / change the poetic devices etc, etc.

I’m thinking that this will save a heap of heartache as a poem like this can take ages to write from scratch.

Adrian