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68 Chapter 4: Poetry

Visual Poetry Projects

and Movie Making

Students need to read poetry if they are writing their own poems. An excel -
lent tool for literary analysis and close reading exercises, poetry uses vivid
language that paints a picture in the reader’s mind. When my students are
introduced to Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, we read many in class
together to understand Shakespeare’s language, meaning, and tone. I then
divide students into small groups and assign each a sonnet for the Five
Frame Photo Story activity: Students read, interpret, and summarize the son-
net in five original photographs. Using only images, students must showcase
the main idea presented in the sonnet. When language is complex, visuals
are helpful to support comprehension, thinking, and meaning making. (For
more discussion of the Five Frame Story activity and its originator The Jacob
Burns Film Center, see Chapter 2 of Personalized Reading.)

Another visually appealing poetry video project is The Sonnet Project from
the New York Shakespeare Exchange. This organization is working to pro -
duce videos of all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Each video highlights a
specific location around the five boroughs of New York City as professional
actors dramatize a sonnet. (The organization is now sponsoring internation-
al and U.S.-based versions of this original series, as well.) After viewing three
or four different videos, my students and I discuss the visual choices the
directors made to help viewers understand the meaning and interpretation
of the sonnet. I then assign students a sonnet so they can create their own
movie that visually showcases the sonnet’s true meaning and key ideas. To
help students analyze the sonnet and plan their movie, I give them a graph-
ic organizer that breaks down the project into smaller parts and scaffolds
their thinking. Some of our learners need this type of scaffolding for making
meaning out of poetry, whether with complex texts like Shakespeare or a
standard poem.

I present the graphic organizer shown in Figure 4.2 to help students peel back
the layers of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In class, this would be an I Do, We Do,
You Do lesson where I first model a close reading of a sonnet. I think aloud
in front of the class, sharing my questions and inferences about the sonnet.

Excerpted from Chapter 4, “Poetry: Traditional, Visual, Makerspace.”

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