Incorporating Technology into Poetry (or, Using Technology to Improve Fluency During Extended Day)
Allisyn Levy

When I have the rare opportunities I have to work with small groups of kids, I like to incorporate technology in ways that are harder to do with my entire class. This year, I spent the last few months teaching Extended Day with a colleague and focusing on improving fluency for some struggling readers. We decided to weave animation into poetry, which proved to be highly motivational for the kids and yielded fantastic results.

To begin, we gave our group of ten students an assortment of poetry books to read. We modeled fluency and expression by sharing poems with the whole group, led them in shared readings of poems, and read individually with them to get to know their reading strengths and weaknesses.

After getting to know the kids well as readers, we paired them up and asked them to choose a poem they’d like to learn well. Students practiced the poems until they read them beautifully. Then we had students create a short animation to go along with the poem. This took a few weeks, as students considered the meaning of their poem and created visual interpretation. Throughout this process, we recorded each group reading the poem using iMovie and a USB microphone. The plug-in microphone eliminated most of the background noise and gave us a high quality recording that we were very pleased with. Using FrameThief, a shareware program we downloaded, we taught students how to animate their poems by moving each piece of their artwork a tiny bit at a time and taking a photo using an inexpensive digital camera mounted on a gooseneck. Once students completed their animations (the more shots, the better – we encouraged our kids to take at least 50 photos!), we exported the FrameThief files as a Quicktime movie and imported that file into iMovie, where their audio recording was.

The outcomes were fabulous and the kids were thrilled. They were able to transfer the reading skills into their everyday reading and showed great improvement in fluency and expression. Their creative animations truly documented their reading progress, as well as flaunted their creative abilities. And they made their classmates very jealous.

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See also: For the Love of Poetry by Carolyn Hornik