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Finding Poetry in Pleasure Reading
|Grades||6 – 8|
|Activity Time||One hour|
Children and teens who enjoy writing poetry but are looking for new and interesting topics to write about needn't look any further than the reading they already do for pleasure. While young poets are enjoying the experience of reading a book or magazine of their choice, offer them this opportunity to focus on a favorite passage. They choose a section that they find richly descriptive or emotionally powerful and transform it into what's known as a "found poem." Writers can then extend the activity by using the structure of their found poem to create another text called a parallel poem.
There are well-documented connections between the literacy skills involved in reading and writing. This activity encourages children and teens to focus their leisure reading a bit as they search for the passage they will use to create their found poem and reflect on the effects of the language in the passage. They then engage in the creative process of shaping and changing the published language into a creation of their own.
This activity is modified from the lesson "Found Poems/Parallel Poems."