Ban Highlighting, Blackout Instead – Poetry Nonfiction Using Notability

Source: Bit Rebels

If your students are like ours, when they pick up a highlighter to underscore what is important in the text they are reading, they highlight just about everything. We might as well give them the information copied on yellow, pink, or orange paper. Part of the problem is they don’t “clean read” first to understand the context for the content. They just highlight away to the point of distraction.

Source: ASIDE, 2014

The concept of finding select phrases to support the topic does not even occur to them. This exacerbates the problem, leading to paper or electronic notes covered in color. Everything becomes important. They fail to select the main idea and miss supportive evidence for it.

Recently, we started to experiment with the blackout technique that is often used in creating poetry from newspapers and other texts, and we banned highlighting. To our surprise, the blackout process had additional benefits that we did not consider at first.

Source: ASIDE, 2014

In their search for the perfect word choice, students needed to reread the content for the finished product to make sense. In other words, they had to stick with the text. This method alone opened up opportunities for them to think about the information. It was anything but random in selecting the right words or phrases to make their nonfiction poem work.

The process was simple. The students download a PDF from our website and opened it using the app Notability on their iPads. This allowed them to carefully revise selected content, proofread for continuity, and ensure a poetic flow of information before they started the blackout process.

Source: ASIDE, 2014

Of course, the anticipation in eliminating everything else was the fun part. It was an excellent way for them to engage with the text, understand the content, and have a blast doing it.

For other resources on using the blackout technique, see:

• Tip of the Week: Blackout Poetry
• iPads X Black Out Poems
• Austin Kleon - Newspaper Blackout Book Trailer
• Austin Kleon - Taking A Peek Inside "The Invention Machine"

Designing Information: A Lesson Using Poetry

Source: ASIDE

Our third-grade students do a large unit on the Native Americans. It begins with the study of the Iroquois Indians in New York and finishes with an independent research project on a specific tribe in North America. As part of this interdisciplinary unit, they work on a series of projects to support their understanding of our native people. This includes a variety of art projects, as well as a multimedia presentation using information and technology to demonstrate their knowledge of the hardships the Native Americans endured at the hands of European explorers and the United States government.

Source: ASIDE, 2011

As a further extension of this unit, the students analyze the poetry from the book The Circle of Thanks: Native American Poems and Songs of Thanksgiving by Joseph Bruchac. The book contains fourteen poems with themes of thanksgiving and the appreciation of nature based in part on traditional songs and prayers. The students learn that these works from the different American Indian cultures celebrate the aspects of creation and the natural resources that were so crucial for their survival and sustainability.

Source: ASIDE

For us, it is important that our students make the connection that Native Americans lived off the land and had a great respect for its gifts. Giving thanks for nature was ingrained in the culture of the American Indians. Their deference for the earth’s resources was unending, much like the continuous line of a circle or ever-winding line of a spiral.

For each of the poems in the book, the students deciphered the meaning to understand the importance of nature to the different tribes. They created the spiraled art you see here to design their own way of expressing why things such as the sun, wind and rain were so significant. The students learned that American Indians were continually grateful, especially for the plants and animals that gave them food and medicine. Each of these designs represents a way of envisioning the information from the poems, as well as embodying their way of personalizing the content.

Source: ASIDE

The spiral itself denotes a line that continues in the same way that the Native Americans think of nature as an unbroken need for life. By using the spiral to design the information, the students visually thought about the connection between it and the continued thanks for the environment that the American Indians tried to instill in their cultures.