244: Creative Winter Poetry Activities for ELA

The week before winter break can be a great time for wintery poetry.

A mini-unit like this is flexible, seasonal, and easy to fit around whatever else is going on in those final (frantic? fun? festive?) days. You may have favorites of your own to incorporate, but today I just want to share three quick and creative ideas for your toolkit.

#1: Winter Holiday Lipograms

Ever since Melissa Alter Smith of Teach Living Poets introduced me to lipograms, I've been so intrigued by this poetic form. A lipogram is simply a poem in which a poet avoids a certain letter (or letters) of the alphabet, but I love the way Melissa had her students avoid all vowels except one.

For this project (grab the free curriculum I designed with Melissa here), students will choose one vowel and then write a holiday poem using only that vowel. There are three quick brainstorming activities they can do to help them generate enough words with their chosen vowel to write a poem (it's harder than it may sound!).

2: Winter Poetry Tiles

If you've ever played with magnetic poetry on your refrigerator, you already have the idea of digital poetry tiles. These kits are so easy to use to create poems, and they help students relax and move beyond writer's block.

All you need is a Google Slide and a bunch of individual word images to move around on that slide. You can make it as complex or as simple as you like.

Get the full walkthrough in the full shownotes at nowsparkcreativity.com.

Designing these kits does take a little time, and might best be enjoyed with a fun movie and a warm mug of cinnamon apple cider. (Or you can always use mine, which you can peruse here or grab from The Lighthouse).

3. Winter Poetry One-Pagers

The Poetry Foundation has a lovely collection of Winter Poems, including Mary Oliver's "White Eyes," which I would really recommend. Its lovely language and gentle structure gives students plenty to dig into without being overwhelming.

Whether you use "White Eyes" or another winter favorite of yours, why not try a poetry one-pager?

Maybe you've tried one-pagers for novels and you're ready to branch out. Or maybe this will be your first one-pager. Either way, it's a great activity to help students dig into a poem and show their understanding through both words and visuals - a skill vital to many types of real-world communication in our world today.

As always, I suggest sharing a template with students (this is mine on TPT). When you design your template, think about the types of things you want your students to really explore in the poem.

For example, your one-pager instructions might ask students to include:

• a border of imagery from the poem
• poetic devices they notice along with quotations to illustrated them
• connections between the poem and other poems, pieces of art, or books
• connections between the poem and current events or their own lives
• themes from the poem along with illustrations of those themes through quotations and/or imagery
• a look at the poet's style
• a key symbol or image from the poem

If students need full scaffolding, you can let them know where on the page to include each element. If they have some experience and are ready for more independence, you can let them choose where to put everything, or even to use blank paper instead of a template.

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