Curating Poetry
I have really been using the Academy of American Poets website a lot lately, between substitute days and snow days, to send my students all kinds of exercises and activities.
Today, while trying to put together some distance plans for my juniors, I discovered a new tool on the site that allows the user to “curate” the immense amount of poems, interviews, essays and more available on the website. Once logged in, any visitor can create notebooks, with titles and covers, and then make their way through the website adding poems, essays, videos and interviews to their notebooks. If you browse all notebooks, you’ll see some of the possibilities. Search for “Poetic Toolbox” to find one I’m compiling for students next year to help guide our explorations of poetry, and while I’m still snowed in, I also created a Baltimore-themed notebook. Here’s one about poems about music, poems of loneliness, and even vegetable poems. I also put one together of my favorite poems and essays (that are available on the site) and sent the link to my students. In fact, my favorite poems notebook is now one of the featured ones! Their directions were to go through it and choose three poems to write a paragraph-long response to, and send those responses to me. For extra credit, I asked them to put together their own notebooks with at least ten items, and write me three separate paragraphs, one for each of three items, telling me why they chose those items.
Who knows? They might be stir-crazy enough to do it, and if they do, I’d love to see what they choose. I can see this having lots of utility– students creating all kinds of themed notebooks and sharing them with each other, tied to novels, themes, concepts or subjects.
If you ever end up in a more social studies vein, you can do something similar on the Facing History website, though I think you may need to be a member. It’s very cool for putting together sets of documents for students–they also have multimedia.
Oh wow, Becca– I had never been there before, and now I want to dig through it all! I sometimes weave history into my units, especially with Beloved in the springtime, so this could be very useful to me. Thanks!