Kaleidoscope Dreams
Look into your beachball crystal ball.
Hold the top with Mr. Pointer
and spin!Colors swirl, fractals curl.
Spirals to a world
within.
–Margaret Simon, all rights reserved
I got an invitation to play on a website called TinEye Labs from my cyber-friend Linda Baie. This is a fun site to play on. You can select up to 5 colors and get a collage of 35 photos. For my poem above, I selected 3 colors and then chose this photo to write about.
I tried this in my classroom. The bad news: Our school network blocked the site. The good news: I have an iPhone. Bad news: Only one student can use it at a time. Good news: The activity was exciting and inspired fun writing. Since I only teach small groups of students, I was able to meet with each student separately and allow them to play. I sent the photos by email to my school account and printed them. The students glued the picture into their journals and wrote.
One student chose a psychedelic multicolored head to write about. Another student made the comment, “That is what a snake sees, not your face, but the colors of your temperature.” I’m not sure how true his statement is; Gifted kids often tell me things I don’t already know, while they also say completely untrue things with confidence. Anyway, that statement inspired this hilarious poem from Matthew. The photo is here.
Snake eyes…literally!
This is what a snake sees,isn’t it strange?
This is what he sees when he’s in your range.
This is all the heat that is in your body,
Kinda makes everyone a real big hottie!
Poetry Friday is hosted today by Tara at A Teaching Life.
You did it, Margaret. I definitely will try it next week. It is such a fund site. I love your ‘colors swirl/fractals curl’ and Matthew’s poem works just beautifully. I think I’ve heard that about the heat before too, but didn’t take the time to look it up. So glad you worked this out for the students!
I love it! Will definitely try that site too. Sounds like an awesome and spontaneous and highly organic activity with the kids. Gorgeous!
This sounds like lots of fun. Love the poem your student wrote – everyone’s a hottie! LOL. But mostly I loved your poem – succinct and evocative. Love the word ‘fractals’
What a fun process! Sounds as though both you and your students found it inspiring. I enjoyed both these poems, Margaret. Thanks so much for sharing!
I’ll have to check out TinEye Labs. I’ve used TinEye.com in the past for its reverse image search. I’ve found it very handy in locating the source of uncredited images.
I had to laugh when I saw this picture and read your poem, Margaret. The photo reminds me of the spin art booth that was one of my favorite stops at the fair when I was a kid. I had wanted to include that in my poem a few weeks ago, but apparently E.B. White wasn’t big on spin art. What’s even more of a coincidence is that Linda referred you to the site. When I read her poem about leaving on the train with her new husband, the image of a kaleidoscope came into my head. As we get to know people, each new revelation is like the turn of a kaleidoscope, slightly altering the image we had of that person. I think I should go write a poem about that 🙂 Thanks so much for sharing!
Don’t you love the connections we make in this virtual community? Thanks for your comments. I hope inspiration for a new poem comes soon.
Cool website! Cool inspiration for poetry!!
How fun! I smiled at the thought of your gifted kids saying outrageous things believably.