Foreign Language Creative Writing with an Artistic Touch : The Cinquain

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.