Today I used Coldplay’s Paradise and Triptico’s Word Magnets to stimulate a creative poetry activity. You can decide how to use the activity, I will share how I prepared it in less than ten minutes. Triptico is definitely quick, easy and the activity certainly caught the students attention.
Simply copy the song lyrics from one of the many lyrics websites, paste into any notepad or word document, remove the duplicates, triplicates words, and paste into Word Magnets. Word magnets creates the tiles for a simple, fast, effective scaffolding poetry writing activity.
For added colour use an associated image to the song as a background. No prizes for guessing what image I went for with ‘para para paradise.’ Students then create a poem from the magnets. In this class, one student worked ‘live’ while the others worked in their exercise books. At the end of the lesson we had 6 performances.
Extensions include
- rearranging the tiles of example poems
- colour coding the tiles and assigning usage controls
- performing a verse
- interpreting poems constructed in class
- comparison to the song and song writing
- make a word bank available in a public space
The poem created in class, live on the screen, is below for you enjoy. A rather brilliant student composition.
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Thanks Kristian! Next time I compare Ozymandias to Viva la Vida I’ll use magnets
I am rather ashamed that I had to find out who / what Ozymandias was in order to respond. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias
Having done that, I am sure that Triptico magnets would help draw out its themes and imagery. Would you consider writing a guest post for this blog on its merits as a learning tool?
Poetry is my second love, i always write poetry about how i feel. .
Magnets are great for you then.
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