Blackout Poetry

Poetry. Some students love it; others hate it. Many fall somewhere in between.

I've met a lot of students who think poetry is just plain difficult, but I've found that those students often associate poetry with the Shakespearian sonnets and John Donne poems, which can be daunting even for adults. Sometimes, opening up the definition of poetry is all it takes to get them to warm up to the idea.

One way to get students to write a poem relatively pain-free: blackout poetry.

Method: First, you'll need to print out a few pages of a book or article for students to work with. I printed the first chapter of Harry Potter, which I found online, and a few pages from a PDF of "Selected Short Stories" by Arthur M. Jensen.

Then, you ask students to make poems using the words they find on the page. They then blackout the rest of the words and can decorate it to add to the meaning of the story. The easiest way to explain this is to simply show examples, so without further ado, please enjoy (some of) my class's results.

Results:

This student opted to use her words out of order, but she made it clear the order in which they should be read.

Some are more moving than others, and of course, some had a few grammatical errors here and there due to the limited word choices. Even so, that's not a bad selection for students who groaned when I announced our poetry unit.