National Poetry Month: Blackout Poetry!

 April is National Poetry Month and our school year is winding down fast!  (Students are out on May 23rd and teachers stay til May 25).  I need to leave a couple of weeks for my inventory at the end of the school year (and to chase down all of those late books!) so this past week and next week will be my last lesson with the students.  I'll see them the week of April 24th for their final checkout time! 
So I wanted to do a fun activity with them for poetry month.  I have a bunch of old books that I've discarded from our collection and many of the books are falling apart (broken bindings, whole sections of pages falling out, etc.).  I took the most pitiful of the books and carefully cut out the pages.  We used these pages for blackout poetry!  
What is blackout poetry you ask?  Well, I read about this great lesson on Scholastic's website and based on activity on that information.  The student chooses words from the book page that "call" to them.  They select "connecting words" that hold their selected words together.  The poems usually end up being free verse, short phrases and random themes.  The poems almost never have anything to do with what the author was actually writing about!  In fact, we instructed the students to only scan the page for anchor words, not to actually read the page for a plot summary or theme.
To say that the kids loved it would be the understatement of the year!  They were OBSESSED with it!  Whole groups were coming back to the library during lunch to ask for extra book pages and begging to stay to make more poems!  
Our school is pretty great about supplying the teachers with things they need in their classrooms, but this activity required more Sharpies than one teacher could get in their paws, so a trip to Costco was needed.  I bought a giant pack of black Sharpies (25) and a giant pack of colored Sharpies (25) and spent less than $20 for both.  The kids also used colored pencils for shading in large areas or for mixing colors.
As I started to take pictures of some great examples for posterity, I realized that almost all of the poem pages had turned out amazingly well.  There were only a couple of pages that showed a real lack of effort (mostly from a couple of kids that didn't want to be there in the first place).  Even my most reluctant students dived right into this activity and worked silently.  We didn't even require them to be silent, they were just so focused!  The English teacher and I also told each class that we wouldn't "approve" a poem or design before the student proceeded with their work;  poems are highly individual and personal.  Each student needed to create work that they were proud of and that showed off their skills.