Using Wordle For Poetry

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We are celebrating National Poetry Month in my library, and one of the most enjoyable poetry activities we’ve done is to create “shape poems” using Wordle.  I began by dividing each class into groups to brainstorm a list of either nouns, adjectives, or verbs related to Spring.  Then I asked the students to choose their favorite Spring words to type into Wordle to create a word cloud.  Once students were comfortable with the procedure, I allowed them to individually choose topics that were meaningful to them and brainstorm a list of related words to create their own Wordles.  Now, is this really a shape poem?  No, because the shape created by Wordle really has no relation to the idea of the poem.  But playing with all the fonts, color palettes, and layout options Wordle allows does get students thinking about the fact that words can be arranged in many different ways on a page to create mood and meaning, and that’s not a bad day’s work!

Wordle: Spring

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