The website I'm introducing in this blogpost is inspired by my adolescent fears: Magnetic Poetry.
I am quite certain that most of you (reading this post, anyway) has come across this concept before. Ready-made magnetic words and a blank canvas. Poetry in the making.
This website could be used to make poetry more accessible to students. Hopefully, in the act of creating their own works, they would come to be less intimidated by poems, or even be more attuned to the ways poets use literary devices with the intention of creating certain effects. The magnetic poetry website would be ideal for this as it has ready-made words for students who may feel less confident in their linguistic abilities.
As a follow-up activity, students could be tasked to critique the creative work of their classmates, enabling students to see how their intentions in the writing of their poems might not be translated to reader interpretation, thus helping them understand the dynamics of the reader-writer relationship.
I love magnetic poetry. I always wonder whether it is useful to teach students how to write poems of their own. I want to teach students to write their own poems as well because I believe that having them go through the writing process can expose them to the various literary techniques in a more interactive manner - especially for those who learn better by doing. But I wonder why not many literature teachers do this - is there a reason behind it?
ReplyDeleteI have the same concern! Perhaps teachers don't factor creative writing into their curriculum because it's not graded. Quite a pity because there are so many benefits to poetry-writing. That said, writing can be quite intimidating – this magnetic poetry kit makes the process so much fun!
DeleteMagnetic poetry online! I was just trying to make a poem with the concrete pieces of magnetic words in my room today, and it occurred to me that sometimes, being forced to work with a limited number of words with good BUT other times, creativity may be better served with having a few limited words. Playing with your online magnetic poetry reminded me too that sometimes the point of the exercise is not so much writing a poem, but figuring out why I used certain words in combination rather than others (e.g. candy ocean versus candy cloud - juxtaposition brings new meaning so surely I must think carefully about the words I place next to each other).
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