Fresh Look Fridays - Magnetic Poetry

Are your students having poetry writing blocks? Today's Fresh Look Fridays post features the fun online Magnetic Poetry site.

Students drag the virtual fridge magnets to form sentences, poems, short stories, etc.   Using the website on a SMART Board as a center gets kids up out of their desks and adds a bit of a starting point for those writers who are struggling with putting words to paper. 

Bonus tip: use the new transparency layer in SMART Notebook 10.6 (Windows only right now) to add digital ink for words that aren't on magnets, then take an area capture of the overall work and save to a Notebook page.


As a once-in-awhile formal English teacher (I could write an essay as a Social Studies teacher, ergo I could apparently teach Language Arts too), I know that poetry wasn't always the most highly anticipated unit for students.  Anything that gets students a bit more engaged with writing is great in my books.


Vanessa

Fresh Look Fridays, on a Saturday :)

Good morning,

Due to a number of circumstances beyond my control yesterday, I was unable to access the internet to publish this post yesterday.  So here is the next installment of Fresh Look Fridays...on a Saturday morning:

Modeling how to write an essay is always an essential part of any English class.  The Essay Map website is basically an interactive, digital essay organizer.

 

What I really like about this website is that it allows the teacher to easily model an outline map if displayed on an interactive whiteboard, and there's a print feature at the end that allows students to get a hard copy of their graphic organizer.

Take a minute on your Saturday morning/afternoon/evening and check it out!

Have an awesome weekend :)

Vanessa