Technology Tuesday: Shape Poems

I have always loved Shape Poems but found it so difficult to form the words in the correct shape.  I started looking for an app that might do it for me and came up with something close.

With 2nd grade this week, I read them some shape poems from Come to My Party by Heidi Roemer.

We talked about how these poems rhymed, but not all poems do.  We talked about how poems describe things and can be about any topic and then I had them open the Read, Write Think Theme Poem app on the iPads.  

This app has different themes to choose from.  We picked Nature poems.  Students wrote a poem about the sun, flowers, rain, trees, moon, sun, leaves or fish.  Then before we saved it, we copied the words of the poem using the select all and then copy feature.

We then opened the website Tagul.  

WARNING: This website requires a login.  I used my library google account, but I went in ahead of time and on each iPad logged in and created a shortcut on the home screen of the iPad to make it easy for the 2nd graders during the lesson.  There are also a bunch of different features on this website, so I could suggest playing around with it yourself before jumping in and doing it with a class.

We created a new cloud and imported our words that we had copied using the paste feature,  Then click VISUALIZE and wal-ah our words were in the shape of a... cloud.  We then looked at the different shapes available on the website and picked one that went with out poem.  Tap visualize again and then poof... our words were inside a shape that matched the poem. 

  

       

  

You'll notice the words in the colored shape poems are not in order of the poem but we were still excited about what we had done!