Get creative with the Book Creator Poetry competition

Today (21st March) is World Poetry Day. What better day to announce an upcoming poetry competition?! In fact, the whole of April is National Poetry Month, so let's celebrate together and get creative!

How do we make poetry come alive for kids?

This might be a question you've asked yourself before. We've given it some thought ourselves. We've concluded that poetry only really hits home when it's read aloud.

Here's a fantastic example:

In Book Creator, you can record audio or video directly onto the page, and this is where poetry could really come alive. Maybe you could take a leaf from Flocabulary's book and expand poetry into a form of rap with a beat and music?

Inspiration for teaching poetry

If you're looking for inspiration on how to introduce poetry to your classroom, I'd recommend checking out this fantastic set of articles on the Edutopia website from Matthew James Friday. Matthew is an international school teacher, literacy consultant, and professional storyteller.

"Poetry may contain fewer words than students are used to in reading assignments, but the heightened focus on vocabulary, sentence construction, and meaning ultimately serves to heighten their writing and thinking skills."Matthew James Friday

Matthew's articles contain guidance on how to make poetry writing fun, how to create an inspiring Poetry Recital Unit, how to create Classroom Agreements using poetry, and how to introduce poetry to elementary and primary classrooms (among other things!). A wealth of knowledge.

Collaboration, Inspiration, Illustration

That was a rather poetic heading, wasn't it? Getting onto the subject of how Book Creator can even further improve the creative process, think about how you could work on creating an anthology of poetry in one book. You could have students focus on different forms of poetry - acrostic, haikus, sonnets, rap, limericks, free verse, etc.

For inspiration, make sure to check out some of the key poetry resources online, for example:

• Poetry Foundation
• Poetry Out Loud
• Poetry International

You might also want to check out some of the poetry already made in Book Creator. We’ve seen Book Creator used to great effect for poetry over the years, including a 163-page poetry compilation with 35 classes from 22 states/countries worldwide and a collection from a 6th grade class made entirely on iPads. Here's a library of poetry books to give you some food for thought. 📚

And here's our very own Jon Smith reading his own poetry out loud, Dr. Seuss style! If he can do it, you can!

As for illustration - we do want to see your poetry come alive. You can insert photos, GIFs, hand-drawn illustrations, videos - whatever you like, into Book Creator. If you do want to craft your own drawings but you're not the best illustrator, take advantage of AI and use the AutoDraw tool in Book Creator to magically improve your illustrations!

That's what Tech Integrationist Eric Curts did when he made his poetry book in Book Creator. See below ⤵️

The Book Creator Poetry Competition

Pulling together all of these ideas - we've come up with a Book Creator competition to help you put these ideas into action and get your schools creating poetry.

The competition will launch on Monday 3rd April and will run for the whole month. There will be two age categories: 4-11 and 12-18. For younger students, we're asking you to get collaborative and create a book of poetry together, showcasing different forms of poetry. For older students, we want entrants to focus on creating a beautiful poem and showcasing how they bring it alive by reading it out loud.

For full details, head over to the competition entry page at bookcreator.com/competition.