We started our poetry unit this past week, and by Thursday I was feeling about as “Blah” about poetry as my students. I hadn’t yet broached my favorite poems as I was using one larger poem in each of my grade levels to teach some of the basic poetry terms, so my enthusiasm was really starting to wane.

I looked around my classroom for some inspiration and discovered a lot of old Close Reading books that needed to be tossed out. Then a brilliant idea struck: Why not rip out some pages and let them create poems?

Blackout poems are poems that students create by selecting certain words or phrases on a page and blacking out all of the rest. I pulled up some examples, selected my own page (part of “The Tell-Tale Heart”), and hoped for the best.

When I announced the assignment to my 1st period class, it was met with uncertainty, but my 6th grade honors managed to pull it off. 2nd period? Some jumped at the assignment with enthusiasm, and others struggled. 3rd period? Questioned everything. 5th period? A single student shouted, “Oh my god, Yes!” She was excited and asked to do more than one. I have to agree. I enjoyed creating mine as well.

The results of this assignment was fabulous. One student asked to re-do her poem because she felt she did it wrong. She didn’t understand that what she pulled out spoke volumes. Isn’t that what writing is all about. Allowing one to make mistakes that fall into place? Creative writing should be a safe space. It’s a teaching moment that allows you to try different ideas until something fits. She was given an opportunity to recreate a poem, but I informed her that I liked the original.

I’m going to share some of my favorites below.

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One of the projects that I like to do every other year is to have my students create Poetry Lapbooks. I generally will assign the lapbook at the beginning of the unit and will teach my content throughout. By the end of the unit the students will have their list of terms and examples from their lessons to include in their lapbook. I also give the students time throughout to work on the lapbook, and include ways to incorporate the large number of terms into their lapbook without using up all of their space. The reason for this is that students have to include a minimum of 3 poems in their lapbook (2 they have written and 1 favorite). As we go through our unit, they will have written at least 3 poems (All About Me, Haiku, and Concrete).

All of our Lapbooks start off the same with a plain manilla folder that I give them. They can choose to use it as is, or they may fold it.

I highly encourage them to decorate the outside. This allows them some personality. The only problem is that some get caught up in the decorating and don’t move into the filling of the lapbook. It’s important that they decorate and move forward.

Students are asked to fill up all of the space with terms and examples. This isn’t including the poems that they have written yet. Each term has to have a definition and an example. As I teach a term, we study examples. They are free to use any of the examples from class, but not from the PowerPoint. The reason for this is to make students go back into their text and pull the examples because those are on the test, not the PowerPoint that was created using an older textbook.

When I’m teaching poetic elements, we generally do a close reading of the poems and I demonstrate marking up the text, and then the students will do the same with at least 2 other poems. By the time we are finished, all of the poems in their Close Reading books are marked up and they should have examples for their lapbooks.

To grade these lapbooks, I tend to use a simple rubric to make grading quick and easy.

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