Students are more motivated to write when the topic is of personal interest. I recently saw a colleague, Katya Hottenstein, working with a Spanish class on writing short poems. The poem was the classic Cinquian, but she took it a step further and the students created artistic representations of their poems. The topics were chosen by students and the artistic rendering was left up to the writer. Cinquain poems are typically written in one of these forms.
- Line 1: One word
- Line 2: Two words
- Line 3: Three words
- Line 4: Four words
- Line 5: One word
- Line 1: A noun
- Line 2: Two adjectives
- Line 3: Three -ing words
- Line 4: A phrase
- Line 5: Another word for the noun
- Line 1: Two syllables
- Line 2: Four syllables
- Line 3: Six syllables
- Line 4: Eight syllables
- Line 5: Two syllables
Here are some examples of the creative writing projects that the students created.
This is neat – what level is tihs? I think only a handful of my kiddos in high school would really be interested in the artistic representations.
This was a 7th grade class.
I have done this exact activity with 10th and 11th graders. For 10 th grade they chose to write about their favorite thing about spring, and 11th graders were instructed to choose an environmental issue. They really did a great job!
Wonder to hear. Thank you for sharing.