The Making of Our Year In Poems

I can hardly believe this year is almost over! I am so incredibly proud of my hard working students, and will miss this little group so much! They have grown so much as leaners this year, and I have so enjoyed sharing that learning with them.

To celebrate our year together we decided to tap into our poet skills and create a reflective anthology of poems that represent different memories from our year. Last week I shared about our project, and a few published poems, but I wanted to share more about the process since we are finished. The project took us about 2 weeks to completely finish, as students were working at their own pace and sharing our five iPads. 

I decided that ThingLink would be the best way to share all the different poems as they are in multiple formats. Here's the final product ... 

So more about our process ...

1. Each student chose a memory or topic to write a poem about, and went through the writing process.
2. Then, they decided on how they wanted to publish the poem. They chose the apps to use. Here are a few of our favorites! Some just used one app, others chose 2 or more, either way the results were great! 
3. Next, students published their poem to our YouTube channel from the camera roll if they made a video. If they used only Haiku Deck, then they published it to our gallery. 
4. To create the background image for our anthology each student thought of one adjective to describe their first grade experience. We used black paper and colored chalk to record these thoughts. 
5. I took a picture of each student's writing, then used PicMonkey to collage them. I used Canva to create the "Title" image. 
6. We then used ThingLink to add all our poems. We went through our YouTube channel and Haiku Deck gallery and added our recent poems, and others from earlier in the year. Now we have an interactive image that represents memories from our year!

Reflections for next time -

  

   I think that next year I would like to start this project at the beginning of the year. We'll have more poems then, and can really make it more of a comprehensive class portfolio / yearbook. I think it would be really neat to see how student writing, and their published projects evolve through the year. I can't wait to get started!

Happy creating!