Poetry

This is a website that my technology facilitator showed one of my students. Today that student came back to class and showed all of us. We wrote poems for Valentine's Day. At http://www.festisite.com/ you can also upload your own poetry, put your face on a playing card or a 1,000,000 dollar bill. I loved the poetry and writing aspects of this website. I also loved the fact that the student was sharing her knowledge of technology. I completely let her take over the instruction here because I didn't have a clue as to how to use the website. (Of course I remained in charge of the classroom and facilitated.) She did a great job of teaching us all. This also gave her self confidence and pride.

After writing their quick and easy poems, I let them explore the cards and money. They loved it because it was fun. However, one must keep in mind we are at school; so their has to be a learning application involved. Therefore, I am trying to figure out ways that I could connect the money to a practical application. These are some ideas I came up with: use the face of a character from a book and write about the character using the party printer, have students uses their faces and write about themselves to introduce themselves to the class at the beginning of the year, and use the playing card and have students place two character's from a book on a card and write a compare contrast paragraph about the character. Another use might be to put faces of explorers on different types of money from a country they explored; then write a list of reasons as to why this explorer found a million dollar discovery. If anyone else has an ideas, please feel free to post a comment.