Spine Poetry Day 1

After seeing Andy Plemmons' tweet about using Tellagami to narrate his students' spine poems, I decided to give it a try! I invited two fourth grade classes to the library to see what they could come up with from our shelves. 
When the students arrived at the library, I went over the purpose for their visit:

• I explained that we would be creating poems using the spines of books to tell a story. I had created one, and shared with them my process of how I eventually came up with my stack of books.
• I then showed them Andy's Tellagami video and talked about the books with the best titles to build their poems will be in the Fiction and Everybody sections. 
• I only spent a few minutes going over the steps to make the Tellagami video of their poem and pointed out the areas of the library they should use to record their narration.
• Then their teacher divided them into groups of 3 or 4 students to work together to create a group spine poem. We also assured them that the next time that they visit the library they would have more time to create individual spine poems, if they wanted to make one of their own.

I was so impressed with the focus of each group and how they worked together to decide if a title fit into the story they wanted to tell or not. Here's a few groups in process:

Choosing books from the Meadow Wood shelves

Creating avatars and videos

This was my finished spine poem:

And here are their finished videos:

A few things we learned:

• taking the picture in the app allowed you to line things up better
• after setting the background you CAN move the avatar, which at first I told them could not be moved to the side any further
• poetry is fun!
• fourth graders are silly, sentimental, and creative!

I can't wait to see what some of these students create on their own!