wow project

Teaching Literacy – PoetryUsing PicLits

Kristen CaseyED 5700

What is PicLits?

PicLits is a web based program that allows students to post their poems online.

Students are given the freedom and creativity to develop their poems in a manner and style that is unique to them.

Students use pictures and keywords to create their poetry and inspire others.

How did PicLits start?

“PicLits.com emerged one cold, Idaho night near the turn of the century, from a combination of refrigerator poetry, an interesting article in USA Today, some Sun Valley Pale Ale, and a roaring fireplace.” (PicLits.com)

Teaching Literacy through PicLits

Teaching Literacy through PicLits

PicLits breaks writing poetry into steps for students.

Some students experience difficulty with writing that others may consider simple, like writing simple sentences.

PicLits allows students to build up to creating a complete poem.

All words provided by the site are separated into categories such as nouns, adjectives, adverbs.

PicLits Steps

Step 1: Creating simple sentences. Students use nouns and verbs to create a sentence. It can be as simple as “Ice melts”.

Step 2: Students “drag and drop” words to create compound sentences.

Step 3: Lastly, students work their way to writing a paragraph

Teaching Literacy through PicLits

These steps are important for students who have difficulty writing. It is important to break down writing steps into separate lessons and have a practice activity with each lesson

PicLits allows teachers to do just that.

Rhyming

PicLits continues to advance it’s poetry lessons by moving on to rhyming once students have successfully completed Part I.

Writing Poetry

PicLits provides lesson plans for mastery of poetry writing. Each Lesson has students identify a poetic device, practice it, and then apply it to their own PicLit.

My PicLits Poem

• This is a PicLit that I created:

http://www.piclits.com/viewpoem.aspx?PoemId=77123

• This is a PicLit that one of my students created:

http://www.piclits.com/viewpoem.aspx?PoemId=77124

My PicLit Poem

My Students PicLit Poem

Works Cited

www.piclits.com. Friedlander, Jerry. 2007-08.