PicLit

What a silly poem! But I do recommend PicLit as a fun warm-up or a low-stress foray into poetry with differentiation built into it. Here's how this works: PicLit has a stream of pictures at the top of the screen. When you click one of the thumbnails, it shows the picture larger below and you can then choose "drag and drop" or "freestyle." I chose drag and drop because I'm lazy and have kitchen cabinets to prime and paint. Real life, people. It's like those poetry magnet sets. I like that it's limited in one area but very open in another because if you click "freestyle," you can write any poem you want. You can put the words anywhere on the picture that you want and there is a little choice as to the form of the word and capitalization.

In teaching poetry, I always get kids who are all over the spectrum of comfort in writing poems. This (free) website allows kids choice in terms of the photo and how they will write the poem. It was challenging to write the poem with the words that were provided because I would get an idea but then a word or words wouldn't be available to me. It would be fun to see how different the poems would be with the same picture and same word choices; I would guess there would be a lot of variety within the narrow parameters. I was thinking that the students could also create their own word lists (they could all use the words from one of Macbeth's monologues, for example) to see what new piece they could create. The students would have fun and feel comfortable sharing them because they wouldn't be terribly personal, as sometimes poetry can be.

In the RAT framework, I think this would be amplification, I think. It could replace the magnet poetry, but here students could be using the tool at the same time and posting or sharing to social media or a website.

How would it enhance their educational experience? I think it would be really fun and challenging for kids to come up with a poem from a limited list and pair it with a photo. It would be a good jumping off point for kids to take one of their photos and write a corresponding poem. It also puts poetry in a pretty safe space, which is what a lot of students need. You can't really be wrong with creating a poem from a non-negotiable list.

For a totally non-school appropriate idea: this would be really fun at a party with some drinks. Okay, this would be really fun at a party with some drinks if your friends are delightful nerds, which mine are.