For this weeks’ inquiry, I decided to research some resources to help me engage students in middle and high school in playing with language in a poetic way (which as I found out recently was the point of my inquiry to begin with). First and foremost, I discovered than we can make “magnetic poetry” online – i.e., you don’t actually need a fridge. Here’s an example:

Also, the Poetry Foundation website has a specific section for children and another for teens where, among other things, they suggest learning prompts. This weeks’ is a “Misspelling bee” for grades 9-12: “Today’s prompt is the opposite of a spelling bee. We’ll look at poems wherein the poet intentionally gets standard English spelling or grammar wrong. They might do this in order to tell a story about how some people relate to the English language, or to draw attention to language as a material that poets work with, just as a painter’s material is paint.” I love that.

There is also a tool called “Rhymezone” where you can type in the word that you’re looking to rhyme and it will suggest several options, helpfully grouped by the number of syllables. If I’m struggling to come up with a rhyme for “bottle”, for instance, Rhymezone will suggest things like “Aristotle”, which could take my poem in a whole new direction (one that I suspect would make it rather comedic).

I will continue to amass resources to explore poetry in the classroom. In the meantime, please feel free to use one of these tools to make your own poem (or even just a couple of lines) and post them in the comments!