Book Spine Poetry
If you’re looking for a fun way to get students creating poetry and at the same time getting new titles into their hands, try using book spine poetry. This is such an easy activity that makes us all poets. Just scan your bookshelf for interesting titles-each title will make up a line of your poem, arrange the titles so that they run together as a poem, stack them in a pile and take a picture!
Here is a link to some 2017 book spine poetry winning poems (with the youngest category being 5 to 8 year-olds!).
Some real-world mentor texts of book spine poetry happened in 2015 when the Toronto Library and the Kansas City Library used spine book poetry to trash talk when their baseball teams were both vying for a spot in the World Series. Take a look!
We recruited some of our colleagues from around the office and we wrote a few together this afternoon:
Melissa
Jill
Kelly
Derrick Grant-Subject Coordinator for Math (obviously…)
Gina Dunnett-Director of Schools for the Oromocto Ed Centre
Posting these on class Twitter and Instagram accounts are a great way to share the book spine poetry created in your classroom. If you try it, we would love to see some examples of your students’ poems!