Write and Play Found Poetry
Found poetry, often described as the literary equivalent of a collage, is when you take existing words, phrases or passages and re-frame them to create poetry. Help your child play with words and express herself to create found poetry.
Materials
Before You Play
Encourage your child to notice words that are all around us. They’re on scrap pieces of paper, signs, books, junk mail, cereal boxes, etc. Even when you don’t see them, you hear them spoken every day. Words are just laying around, ready for you to pick them up and play with them.
Explain to your child that punctuation and proper sentence structure are not important when it comes to crafting a poem. Instead, you want to create feeling and rhythm. So rather than get bound up by convention, the freedom of poetry can help kids let the words flow in a way that other writing doesn’t. Check out the Poet Warriors Project for examples.
Directions
With your child, create a list of words, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, exclamations and articles/conjunctions. Older children can take a newspaper or magazine and highlighting words to create a line of poetry and using a black marker to black out the rest.
Place strips of masking tape onto socks, one strip for each sock. Socks not your thing? You can do this with index cards or strips of scrap paper. Think of the popular refrigerator poetry magnets.
Write a word on each strip, so that every sock has a word on it. You can ask your child to come up with a list and write them down as she says them. Older children can write the words themselves. Save a few socks to add words your child might need to help round out her poetic expression (from the list above).
Place the socks on the floor or in a laundry basket.
Take turns with your child to create poetic lines from the words listed on the socks.
Your child can also create a poetic collage by gluing together cut up strips of writing. How does writing change when you rearrange its flow? This can help children understand the importance of flow in essays and other writing.
Explore Further
Check out these books at your library to further inspire your young poet.
- Falling Up Shel Silverstein
- I Heard it From Alice Zucchini: Poems about the Garden Jaunita Havill
- Now We are Six A.A. Milne
- Bone Poems Jeff Moss
- Love That Dog Sharon Creechwri
- Brown Girl Dreaming Jacqueline Woodson
- Gone Fishing Tamera Will Wissinger
Jennifer Cooper is the blogger behind Classic-Play.com, an online resource for creative families. Her favorite past times include: dancing around her living room, watching the Pink Panther with her kids and daydreaming. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, photographer Dave Cooper, and two children.
Literacy