3 Engaging Post-Reading Activities

Finally, we are off to the last bunch of poetry reading tasks in which you could engage your students after doing pre-reading and while-reading activities! Post-reading activities are important as they provide opportunity for students to make connection with the text.

These cool cool-down tasks which include differentiated transcreation activities, reflective journal and digital poetry will also help ensure knowledge retention and application.

Differentiated Transcreation Activities (DTA)

DTA is a set of varied activities that cater to the differentiated learning styles or modalities of the learners: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Visual learners are sensitive to pictures, shapes, sculptures and paintings. Auditory learners are more inclined to listening, rhythms, tone and chants. Kinesthetic learners learn best through gestures, body movement, object manipulation and positioning.

Before engaging your students to these activities, make sure that you have determined their dominant learning style. You could have done so after administering to them the Learning Styles Inventory.

DTA involves four phases. First, give your students instructions about the activities and present the criteria for assessing their outputs and/or performances. Now, let them create their outputs and/or rehearse their performances.

The visual learners create their paintings or drawings inspired by the poem. The auditory learners experiment on suitable tunes for the poem, and then rehearse. The kinesthetic learners conceptualize pantomimes or one-skit plays based on the poem, and then rehearse.

Afterwards, each pair or group presents before the class their output or performance. Have other students do their evaluation of the output or performance as a peer assessment. Finally, comment about the outputs and performances by pointing out the strong and weak points, and give suggestions for improvement.

Reflective Literary Journal

Reflection is the highest form of learning. Hence, after reading the poem and engaging them in various interactive activities, students could just spend their time alone by summoning their personal experiences and relating them to the word views of the literary text.

With their pens and journals, they freely write their realizations, impressions and insights about the text. To enrich the content of their reflection, students should make sense of what happened in the poem, and speculate as to why something is the way it is. They could just keep their writings to themselves, or share them with the class.

To ensure the success of this activity, make sure that the students keep the journal handy, write regular entries, and review them regularly.

Digital Poetry

Since we are living in the Digital Age, students are now introduced to various digital platforms and media through which they could develop their language competence, and whet their literary taste. One interesting literary project which the students could produce using these media is digital poetry.

Students can use Moviemaker or any picture or video-editing application to create their own digital poem based on the text discussed. Students can use scanned or downloaded images or, even better, take their own photos with a mobile phone digital camera. They organize their images and use the voice recording feature to read the poem aloud. They can add sound effects, a soundtrack of music they have created, or clips of music that come with the program. These new media allow students to have oral readings linked with the print version of the poem. This approach recognizes the multi-modal nature of poetry and students’ multiple literacy.

After producing their videos, they could upload them on Facebook, YouTube, or their class literary blog site (which could be Word Press or Wix). These digital platforms give way to more virtual viewers who could give valuable feedback about the project. Also, they could serve as handy language and literature teaching and learning portals.

Book Trailer Project

Book Trailer Project is another digital storytelling activity for middle school or high school students after they finish reading a book. Students need to take the key idea from the book to create a short video that persuades people to check out a book they have read.

In this engaging project, students:

determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.
integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
develop personal, cultural, textual and thematic connections within and across genres as they respond to text through written, oral or digital presentations, employing a variety of media and genres.

Doing the book trailer project requires students to summarize, synthesize and analyze the book and put that analysis in their trailer. Furthermore, having students create book trailers is a great way to incorporate technology in the classroom and encourage reading. Thus, book trailer project is a great alternative to boring book report assignments, and can easily be done individually or in groups.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed our poetry reading activity series! I personally loved these activities I have mentioned because they cater to the students’ varying interests and differentiated learning styles; they also enable students to apply a more global understanding and interpretation of the text.

These activities also employ visual, audiovisual and multimedia materials to enrich their learning experiences; and finally develop their 21st century skills which they will need when they leave your class.

If you have any comments, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

Contributed in part by Mark Bonabon