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April is National Poetry Month and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate poetry than with student-created digital poetry books made with Google Slides. National Poetry Month was introduced in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets as a way to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. Each year in April, tens of millions of students, teachers, and librarians rejoice in poetry’s important place in our lives.
Writing Poems with Google Slides
In the blog entry, Slide into the New Year with Student eBooks, I outlined four quick and easy steps on how to create an ebook in Google Slides. Your students will follow this same simple process for creating their digital book of poems.
The Poetry Marathon
In order for students to create a book a poems, they will obviously need to write more than one poem. Using a Poetry Marathon format to create a series of short poems around a common theme would work perfectly for this task. The goal of the marathon is to write one poem every hour, for twenty-four hours straight. The reward would be that you would have a collection of poems produced in one day. Of course, that might not realistically work in your classroom. Therefore, you would need to come up with your own rules for your marathon.
Types of Short Poems
Short poems are crucial for this kind of project as Google Slides will lend itself well to fewer words on a slide. This way, images can also be included to add visual representations of the poems. A few short poems you can explore are cinquains, shape poems, nonsense verse, acrostics, couplets, and haikus. Take a look at these few that I included in my very own book, The One-of-a-Kind Daisy Mae.
Cinquain Poem
Click on image to open the digital book.
A cinquain poem is a verse of five lines that do not rhyme. The cinquain poem was created by Adelaide Crapsey.
Acrostic Poem
An acrostic poem is where the first, last, or other letters in a line spell out a particular word or phrase. The most common and simple form of an acrostic poem is where the first letters of each line spell out the word or phrase.
Couplet
A couplet is a pair of successive lines of meter in a poem. A couplet usually consists of two successive lines that rhyme.
Dynamic Digital Poetry Books Are a Win-Win!
The end result of creating this kind of digital book is a win-win. Not only are students engaged in writing poetry in various forms, but they are also using technology to publish a digital book of their original writing. I hope this National Poetry Month activity will inspire you to keep celebrating poetry digitally all year long!
The teacher or Google administrator gives the students access to the Story Speaker add-on. Students go into Google Docs and select the Add-ons menu and choose Story Speaker — Open Story Speaker. They then write a story in Google Docs either on their own or using one of the two provided templates: Basic or Advanced (more about the templates below). The final step is to click Play Your Story and the story will be read by the Google Home. You can even export the story and save it to a class website or email to parents to listen to on their own Google Home or on Google Assistant on a smartphone. You can watch a short two-minute video to get the idea 
listener must say in order for the story to move forward. Students can begin to learn about basic if/then statements in code and how to predict outcomes. They must think like the listener as they predict what words he/she might say in response to the story. And they must follow logical, branching concepts, all without realizing that they are doing it. In addition, students can put notes to themselves in bold in the writing, much like programmers do, as bold text is not read out loud.
