Slice of Life Post for March 14, 2023

Naturally, I love playing with words. I think anyone who writes probably does. My question is how do we get our students to realize the benefit of playing with words? I love to write crazy sentences like “He loved her for her yellow car.” Then showing students how different this sentence would be if I wrote, “He loved her for her yellow teeth.” Even better, “He loved her for yellow teeth and million dollar bank account” Okay, that kind of attraction makes sense. I can also show them how just saying something like “He loved her” has a power in its simplicity.

I also enjoy inviting students to create what I call “paste pot poems.” Literally, they are a type of found poem, but I would ask students to look at magazines and newspapers and cut out words that appealed to them. After they had compiled a huge amount of words, I would have them begin arranging them to create a poem. Eventually these poems end up looking like ransoms note. Now, I’m sure I stole this idea from some book at some time back in the early days of my teaching so I’m unable to correctly give credit where credit is due. Just saying, this is not an original idea, but you know I think kids always did enjoy that assignment, and I wish I would have thought to use it as a pre-reading assignment for literature. For example, I wish I had given them tons of poems from the Romantics or primary documents from the Depression Era to see what kinds of found poems they would have created.

I also like to have my students use a chart in which they identify the types of words and the number of words they used in a sentence. It’s called SOS, or Save Our Sentences. I think this is a fascinating assignment because it shows a writer any patterns they might be repeating. A writer will see if they’re beginning a sentence the same way or not varying their sentences enough. I should probably use that technique for blogging, but hey, I’m just trying to having fun when I blog, and that’s my whole point about wrangling words.

Anyhoo, what kind of things do you like to do in the classroom to get students to play with words?