Digital Poetry Inspired by The Red Wheelbarrow

This is our second successful attempt at creating digital poetry. Again we used a William Carlos Williams Poem as our inspiration. This time we used "The Red Wheelbarrow". After writing the poems, we read the wonderful book "Love that Dog" together. This book shows the interactions between a teacher and a student as a boy, Jack, is inspired to write poetry based on famous poems. Of course, one of the pivotal poems in the book is "The Red Wheelbarrow". We also wrote a class poem together, which came out fantastic. Lillian produced the video for the class poem.








Here is an Animoto I made last year for the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow".
This post from my Mount Pleasant School days tells about the digital poetry project based on "The Red Wheelbarrow" and shows some of my fourth grader's poems.
Here are poems that last year's fifth grade class wrote.

The first video is for a poem the class wrote together to model the steps in writing a poem. I wanted them to make the last stanza a prepositional phrase, but they also came up with some alliteration along the way. I really like the poem they wrote together. The rest of the poems the student's wrote were just as enjoyable. This was the first time the class got to use the digital camera and "Love that Dog" books funded from two different Donors Choose projects.

The Red Wheelbarrow

Today I introduced the class to one of my favorite poems, "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. I made this animoto video to help make the poem come alive.



The class will be writing their own poems based on "The Red Wheelbarrow" and use Animoto to showcase their work. We will be doing it a little bit different than in previous years, but you can find some of my student's work and more information about "The Red Wheelbarrow" here and here.

"So Much Depends Upon..." Writing a Simple Poem

This week we have again used a poem by William Carlos Williams as inspiration for writing our own poetry. Here is a summary and background information on how I used the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" last year with my class to produce "digital poetry" using the Animoto website. Here is the first batch of poems written by my students this year. It is interesting to observe as my students start moving away from the familiarity of completing schoolwork with "right answers" to being willing to undertake the challenge of letting themselves be creative with schoolwork that doesn't have "right answers" but instead allows for a more creative expression with words. I do wish that the Animoto website had a better selection of songs to choose from, but some of these song choices match the poems pretty well.

"So Much Depends...": Digital Poems

The first of our poems are completed on Animoto. These are based on "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams.

"So Much Depends Upon..." Poetry Part 2

Here are some more of the my student's Animoto poems based on "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams.