In this inaugural post, and I sincerely hope other Thinkfinity facilitators will join me, I’d like to share one of my “Wow!” Thinkfinity sites.

To begin my search, I decided to pursue an interactive that matches this screenshot below:

As a writer, I’m always looking forward to sharing writing tools–interactives according to Thinkfinity–with those I work with a class of grade 3-5 students. Shape poetry is fun to do!

Shape poems, or poems that look like the things they describe, are a fun way to introduce children to poetry. In this activity from ReadWriteThink, everyone can be a poet using the online Shape Poems tool.

When you get to the resource, you’ll find some specific suggestions…here’s what that looks like:

You’ll find a link to the Shape Poem Tool. That will take you to something that looks like this:

There are a few steps to go through, but it’s clear that children are guided through the process of developing a Shape Poem. Some reminders from the lesson:

• You can use the child’s senses to help come up with words. What does the object look like? What does it feel like? How does it sound? How does it smell?
• It can be helpful to type in phrases if the child has come up with words that rhyme or start with the same letter to see how the words look on the same line.
• You can type only 20 characters in each of the fields, so do not use words like a or the. You can use these words later in the poem itself if you choose.
• If you run out of space but not ideas, use a piece of paper to write down extra words.
  Source: Shape Poem

At the end of the process (gee, I’d forgotten how hard it is to write poetry), you can print something like this:

Or, what I think is really neat, maybe take it and drop it into a VoiceThread and have your kids read it aloud and then ask folks to give you comments…like this:

(I’m hosting my pictures via Skitch, but you could just upload the screenshot).

For fun, I took the picture generated by Read-Write-Think and dropped it into a new VoiceThread. Then, I recorded my poem and it looks like this…drop by and leave a comment!

And that’s it! A quick lesson combining ONE Thinkfinity Interactive–Shape Poems Maker–with VoiceThread.com to create an interactive poetry book. How would you revise this?