Color Poems & Comic Life Posters

***Note: Images in the posters shown are not the images included in the ProjectPackage© . 

This tech-integrated lesson was inspired from a lesson from ww.readwritethink.org. I loved the idea of creating poetry based on color-inspired writing, but I wanted to take it one step further and have my students create colorful Comic LIfe posters to go with their poems.  

This led to me creating a ProjectPackage© for teachers with materials necessary to create the posters.  I downloaded images that can be used without concern about copyright infringement. Some images are from government public domain sites and some are from Flickr. The images from Flickr only have to be attributed to the photographers.  I have enclosed a file with photos’ attribution information for posting. 

I suggest reading the book, Hailstones and Halibut Bones by Mary O’Neill and illustrated by John Wallner aloud as it serves as a nice model for the type of poems that I was looking for . . . not just red poems about red things.  For example, a red poem may talk about anger, love, the warmth of a sunset, the taste of chocolate . . . you get the idea.  

I created these brainstorming sheets to help my kids really get their juices flowing.  The first thing that I had them do was to pick a color and then the brainstorming was limited to only that color. I even showed them the images that I collected to inspire their thinking differently about their color. (The blank lines on the brainstorming sheets are for the student to write his chosen color.)

Then my students took their brainstorming sheets and created their poems . . . they may have taken a couple of their ideas from “What things smell ______ ?”, and maybe just one idea from “What makes you feel ____?”  To me, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING is the WRITING.  The technology is a bonus to show their work in a different way, and served as a really good motivator! but the writing is still the most important thing.  We spend the majority of our time sharing, discussing, revising and really searching for the IMAGERY that really stands out.  

The writing below was by a very low special needs student . . . he was so proud of his writing and I was proud of him: 

Black

Dark chocolate tastes black.

Black coffee makes me feel black.

Under my bed is black.

Diving off the high dive and swimming down, not up.

Black is a hole in my heart.

Mad when my dad is yelling. 

Black smells like a wet black cat. 

Black sounds like a bunch of goblins

screaming in your ear on Halloween night.

Black sounds like a black cat.

Black is shadows in a corner.

Black is midnight. 

I love the diving off the high dive line . . . wow. Here’s another “average” student’s work:

Green!

Green looks like a yard with fresh cut grass.

Right after a rainfall is fresh and green.

It’s a fresh lime being sliced.

It’s a sickness slowly overcoming you.

It’s feeling anew in a free world.

The forest in a rain season,

Or sleeping under the sky on our trampoline.

Green is having a water balloon fight in June.

The taste of bananas in a fruit salad.

After the students created their poems, I scanned their pieces and if there were important images that they might have needed for their posters I downloaded some for them and included it in the image files I uploaded to our school server. (One could also add the photos to CDs and have them share and pass on the CDs.) I didn’t search for every “missing image” . . . only one or two per person that they felt were critical for their poster.  For example, the student above thought a picture of a lime slice was critical to his imagery so I downloaded that for him.  My kids also decided that they would only use images that were the color of their chosen color.  In other words, only pink objects for the "Pink" color poems, and so on. (See poster examples below).I teach my students how to search for copyright free images and how to search for images safely, but for this lesson I don’t want their time to be spent on the computer searching for images.  

Next,  I told the kids the five templates styles in Comic Life they could choose from - that way the majority of their time could be spent typing their poem and creating their poster rather than searching through templates . . . which you know they love to do . .. same with fonts! :0)

Then they drag their chosen images into the panes, add two or three partial lines from their poem to the poster by dragging over the little text box.. They also add their “sound effect” letters as the title, add their first name and then I print the poster in color for them. Voila! Kids love how beautiful there work is represented . . . this is one of their favorite tech activities. 

Final Note: There are 107 images in the ProjectPackage© encompassing these colors: black, brown, red, blue, gray, green, orange, pink, purple, white and yellow.. It's a great bank of images to start with. :0)