Catalogue of Critical Creativity

Creating with Words: Blackout Poetry

• Ever since I observed this type of poetry in a middle school creative writing classroom, I have wanted to learn how to master it and use it in my own classroom. I think it would be a great part of a creative writing unit, but it could also be used in conjunction with a reading unit, where students could make their own meaning from a pre-existing text. I think it would be cool to have students bring a text that meant a lot to them, and then they could turn it into black-out poetry with a totally different meaning.

Creating with Images: Emoji Story

• I think this would be a hilarious, yet effective way for students to tell a story. This could be a great way to demonstrate students' comprehension of the text, as well as the structure of the plot, including conflict, rising action, climax, protagonist and antagonist. I like the idea of using a short story in which students will identify each of these characteristics and then making intentional choices to represent them through emojis.

Creating with Sounds: Soundtracking the Moment

• I think this activity would coincide well with a unit or study about theme, tone and mood. I would choose a couple of film clips that have a set soundtrack, and then we could discuss as a class what that soundtrack adds to the scene's mood and tone. We could play with various soundtracks with a lot of different styles of music to find new themes or moods that could be portrayed comically or tragically.

Creating with the Body: Tableaux Repreaux

• Again, I really like this idea because of how intentional students will have to be in their creative choices. I would assign the students to visually portray a key event or climactic scene in a given text. They would need to fully understand the text as a whole, as well as that one moment in time. They would also be able to utilize things such as space, facial expressions, arrangement, props, etc. to show their understanding of the chosen central conflict.

Creating with Stuff: Brick-a-Book

• So fun! I think middle and high schoolers would get really excited about using Legos to portray a scene from a story. I think I could add a constraint of only a limited amount of time or materials, since this is something that is so concrete. Maybe I would give them a more complex prompt, like portraying what it would look like if two different scenes from two different books were combined, or how they would interact together.

Creating with Social Media: Belief Board

• I think it would be cool to assign students to each read a different novel of their own choice, and instead of a book report, they could a belief board for one of the main characters. This would help them to identify characterization and specifically the values and beliefs of different characters, which they would then portray through mainly images.