LEES CREEK — Sarah Sodini’s English classes and Kathryn Kasberg’s Photography and Design classes teamed up at East Clinton for a unit about blackout poetry.
Blackout poems can be created using the pages of old books or articles cut from a newspaper. Using the pages of an existing text, blackout poets isolate then piece together single words or short phrases from these texts to create lyrical masterpieces, according to the website Scholastic.
“Blackout poems, as I’m sure you can imagine, run the gamut from absurd to sublime because all of the words are already there on the page, but the randomness is all part of the fun!” adds the Scholastic article.
At East Clinton, students working in groups used pages from “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee — which the English students just finished studying — to choose words for their poems.
Everyone participated in capturing images using digital cameras and converting them in Photoshop in the school’s Mac Lab.
These images were then transferred over top of the poems, to add imagery and support the message of the poem.
The groups presented their blackout poems to the class, and the poems will be on display at the school through the end of the semester.
A news release submitted by East Clinton educators stated that collaboration between classes extends student learning across content areas, and increases their understanding of relevant topics and subject matter.
Projects like this also encourage social skills, creative thinking, and complex visual and linguistic problem solving, the news release added.
