Digital Tree Poetry

We have begun making our first digital poems. We are exploring words and how they relate to each other  through the model of William Carlos Williams poem "The Locust Tree in Flower". the words in the poem don't seem to relate to each other as in a sentence or even through the phrasing of a typical poem, but when you read the poem through a few times, one can see how they all fit together. I liken the poem to words written on puzzle pieces, mixed up and then randomly placed into the poem, with some words missing. We used the trees in front of New Searles School on a crisp and beautiful fall day to inspire the words we wrote. Then we mixed up the words like puzzle pieces to create our own poems following the "rules" that William Carlos Williams used: a title, 13 words, one word per line, 4 stanzas of 3 words, and a final word at the end.

I then introduced the class to Animoto and we learned to upload the pictures, write out the poem, and arrange it with music, so that we could share the poem online. As you can see they came out fantastic. You can find out more about this lesson on my teaching blog and this blog.

Here is the first time I developed up and used this lesson with a class (Mt. Pleasant School grade 4).
New Searles fifth grade class 2010-2011





by Ryan



by John



  by Alycia



 by Maya



  by Rebecca



  by Alex



  by Mackenzie



by Kayla



by Joey



by Nathan Z.
 


by Nathan F.