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Posts Tagged ‘ReadWriteThink’

Poetry Friday is Here!

Posted in Poetry Friday, tagged , , , , , on February 15, 2024| 47 Comments »

Welcome to Poetry Friday. I am happy to be hosting this week. I chose this week because I am out of school for the week for Mardi Gras break. I’m sorry you do not all get this break. It has been so much fun. And today the fun continues with all of your poetry goodness. Find the link up at the end of this post.

Leigh Anne Eck is naming skies. On Thursday, I read her post on Facebook alongside a photo of a sunrise. She wrote “Today’s sky is “step.” I hope you “step into a new day” and “rise up from the dust and walk away.” Following the madness of Mardi Gras, coming home to the solemn Ash Wednesday, I felt surreal, a mixture of fantasy and fact. Her message grounded me as did my morning walk through my familiar neighborhood. Home.

I thought I might get a poem from all of this, yet that poem is still brewing. Today I am sharing a sweet haiku I wrote about my 4 year old grandson picking a wildflower for me. Here is a photo of the tiny blossom in a Mardi Gras cup. I wrote the haiku using Read, Write, Think Haiku interactive, a prompt from Donna Smith.

Wildflower from Thomas

Winter in Louisiana is mostly wet and humid. On an early morning walk while walking through the foggy air, a grief poem came to me. Maybe reading these two poems side by side will put you into that surreal mood I’m in, where there is joy and grief and everything in between.

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DigiLitSunday: Digital Poetry

Posted in Digital Learning, Poetry, Teaching, tagged , , on April 9, 2017| 8 Comments »

Please use this button on your site for DigiLit Sunday posts

In my classes this week, I introduced the ABCs of poetry. We have written a poem everyday using a different poetic form. My partner for two of these exercises was Read, Write, Think. This amazing site full of lessons for teaching reading and writing also includes student interactives.

For the letter A, we used this one for Acrostics. My students had free choice for the words they chose to write about. The interactive allows for brainstorming and also gives word suggestions. The final form appears as a downloadable pdf. I taught my students how to take a screenshot of the pdf, paste it into paint, and save as a jpeg. They uploaded their jpeg images into our Kidblog site.

Two very different poems above. Erin is a fifth grader. She’s been going through a rough time lately, so I gave her a wishing rock inside a prayer pouch that I had crocheted. Her poem grew from her strong desire to have her dreams come true.

Lynzee was writing from the moment. I had brought in left over cookies from a writing group meeting. She chose chocolate chip and this moment became the subject of her poem. Don’t you love the word voraciously? She is such an avid reader that her vocabulary is advanced. She loves using new words, and I enjoy our conversations about them.

Another interactive we used this week was for diamante poems. In this form, my students selected antonyms or nouns that had near opposite meanings. Like acrostic, this form allows students to explore word meanings. They looked for words that were specific to their chosen noun.

Lani, 5th grade, wrote honestly about her feelings around life and death. Andrew was reading a book entitled “Gross Science” so his poem explored the difference between beautiful and gross. We talked about how each one depends on a person’s perspective.

I hope you will consider playing with language by using these interactives from Read, Write, Think. Happy National Poetry Month!

If you are writing a DigiLitSunday post, link up below.

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Try Out New Apps

Posted in Digital Learning, tagged , , , , on February 8, 2015| 3 Comments »

Please use this button on your site for DigiLit Sunday posts

Please use this button on your site for DigiLit Sunday posts

Have you used Read, Write, Think Interactives with your students? ReadWriteThink.org is a division of The International Reading Association and the National Council for the Teachers of English. The site houses a wealth of ideas, lessons, and activities designed to enhance any K-!2 literacy curriculum.

This week I was teaching plot diagraming. There’s an app for that! Go to this link to find the student interactive. Once students fill in the graphic organizer, they can print it out or save it as a pdf. My students will be adding plot diagrams to their next book talk presentation.

The other interactive I used was the Word Mover. Students can create found poems from the words of famous speeches such as “I Have a Dream” and “The Gettysburg Address.”

Here is a poem from Vannisa using Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words.

One day this nation
will dream that,
all men had meaning
and are true.

The great activity
of the creative soul
must not allow violence.

We shall always pledge
peace to our world,
and justice
to our nation.

–Vannisa

Andrew Raupp contacted me about a conferring app he and his wife have developed. If you are using Evernote, you may be interested to see what Chronicle can offer you. Go to this link to see his presentation.

“Show, don’t tell.” If you teach writing, you’ve probably used this phrase before. But so often we as teachers don’t take our own advice when it comes to our conferring notes.

What if a teacher-centric app existed, which allowed multiple photos, audio recordings, and video recordings to be associated with each conferring note, be it with individuals or small groups? Good news – there is!

Chronicle, developed by husband and wife teachers, is a cutting-edge iPad app harnessing the multimedia technology of the iPad, raising conferring notes to a whole new level. Think of the possibilities: capture audio recordings of a student’s fluency and reading rate, use video recordings of book discussions to provide rich feedback, snap pictures of student “before and after” writing samples.

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