Magnetic Poetry Writing

In his blog, Springtime Magnetic Poetry with Google Drawings, Eric Curts from Control Alt Achieve describes a cool springtime poetry writing activity. He provides a template for teachers and students to use for writing in a creative new way. There are several benefits to using this template in your classroom including the tech skills of dragging, dropping, copying and pasting, creating new words, and editing words within a text box. Additionally, it is free to use and allows for collaboration and easy sharing.

The template is easy to use. On the left side, you will find a variety of commonly use words (including sight words). The work space is located in the middle. In this space, students will place words to build their poems. To the right, students will find a list of springtime specific words, as well as a few blank boxes to add words of their own. In using this template, students can easily draft and revise a writing piece without much trouble.

I can see this being used in my classroom in a variety of ways. One example would be for sentence combining. During sentence combining, students take two or more kernel sentences and experiment with different way of combining them into more complex sentences. This template would provide a fun way of completing that task. Additionally, younger students could use this template to practice creating simple sentences using their sight words.

This is the link to create a copy of this template.