Celebrate National Poetry Month with Makey Makey

Have you heard of blackout poetry? Well if you haven’t, it’s well past time to explore it! By starting with already written text, even our most hesitant poets can dive in and avoid the threatening blank page. All they need to do is black out some words on a page of text - a newspaper, flyer, old discarded book, page printed - and use the remaining words to form a poem. Who can resist scribbling on a page?

Thank goodness for @regratz87 for reminding me that we could level up our blackout poetry by tagging it to a MakeyMakey project. Why take a great poetry project and add ed tech? Why to make it a great project of course! I love how easy it is to make cross-curricular connections. This lovely reading and writing assignment can be easily levelled up to address some mathematics coding expectations - like sequences and concurrent code and address even more Language Arts curriculum like oral communication , along with a dash of media literacy!

I always like to test lessons out before putting them to the ultimate student test so I reached out to my colleague, Bailey for a test run with her gang. They were eager to give it a go and dove right into creativity!

First step - selecting the words to make the poem.

Then step 2 - blacking out! BUT all pencils are not equal, as shown in the following pictures. For MakeyMakey conductivity, the pencil must be a soft graphite like an artist’s pencil. Can you determine which “poem” MakeyMakey can read?

Now it’s time to work in Scratch - get the coding down. Using the the ⬆️⬇️➡️⬅️ directions, the poem is divided into 4 inputs. The poet can then record their voice, reciting the poem and embellish the presentation with sounds from Scratch or ones they create themselves. Of course - longer poems can use lots more inputs and perhaps play with loops if there’s any repetition in the poem. The sky’s the limit!

Looking for some inspiration? Check out what Wes (in grade 4) created here.