Today we spent the morning learning to play with language with as few rules as possible. A few years ago while watching The Lego Movie with my daughter, I was overwhelmed by the parallels between young Emmet's struggle to trust his instinct to build sans instructions and young writers' struggle to play with language without a template or strict guideline.
After watching and discussing clips ("The Instructions" and "Just Build") from the Lego Movie, we prepared for a morning of wild, unhindered word play.
Unasked Questions
We started by considering some unique, "unanswered"questions to inspire poetry. First we read, "A Dream Deferred" and looked at how it pondered an interesting, unanswered question. Then, we played with unanswered questions using a prompt I hijacked from the Morehead Writing Project Online Summer Institute (here). After we played with the listed questions, the writers developed their own questions. I randomly handed out the new questions and we each responded to the
Some student generated unasked questions:
Where do unwritten poems go?
What does the moon think of the stars?
What do stars dream of?
Does it hurt when a pencil is sharpened?
What do camels dream of?
What color is opal?
Magnetic Poetry
Using magnetic word tiles and sheet pans, the writers played with serendipitous word combinations to create poems and story starters.
The writers also experimented with Tanka and blackout poetry, before spending the afternoon in an individual studio mode.
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