Students in Ms. Potter's Language Arts classes connected their poetry to pictures and music. The steps in the process and some examples are below.
Using I-Movies with Our Original Poetry
1. After studying abstract vs. concrete and figurative vs. literal, we wrote poems from unusual picture images - using the ideas we saw in the pictures to create poems together. Fences and ripples in water became bigger ideas than the concrete image.
2. Next we wrote "What I Look For" poems - featuring aspects of friends, athletes, video games, etc. that we think make these great. Adding pictures to the poems in I-Movie allowed us to connect imagery to our concrete specifics.
3. "I Am" poems were next: We used concrete images in our poems to describe something abstract. Our first "I Am" poems were about our own personality characteristics. Our second "I Am" poems were about some other abstract idea such as fear, hope, friendship, etc. Once again we used I-Movie to connect our readers/viewers to our poems with visual images and music.
4. Some students chose to give others a public show of their I-Movies at the 7th Grade Heifer Project Luncheon Fundraiser. Audience reaction was very positive!
5. Our next step... using veterans interviews to create I-Movies and contribute to the local museum. This summer project camp (2007) is open to all 7th and 8th graders who are interested!
Examples of Student Movies: