Poetic Forms and Cootie Catchers (8th)

Today, was our last day before break and the last lesson in our unit on surprise and play. We talked about how varied poetic forms can be and how there are no rules in the ways that a poem can use the page. We looked at a group of poems and talked about how different they all looked and how differently they used form. Some were erasures, some sonnets, some poetry comics, and some document poems. We then looked at Leila Chatti’s Cootie Catcher poem and made a few poems by playing it. Then, we made our own cootie catcher poems. The students came up with such surprising and creative phrases and we had a wonderful time making poems by playing each other’s cootie catchers.