I love when I discover my students are better at something than I am

My students and I are currently exploring found poetry.

Last week we created headline poems which involve cutting out words and phrases from a newspaper or magazine and "finding" a poem from it.

Today we created some blackout poems using torn pages from a retired book in our classroom library. Blackout poems are kind of the opposite of headline poems. You take a marker and outline words you want to use and blackout words you don't want to use.

Not only did my students create brilliant poems from both of these exercises, but they proved to be much better at both of these activities than me.


Some of their headline poems:

Some students' blackout poems were very simple yet no less profound and/or entertaining:

And others got creative and artistic with the way they"blacked out" their words:

Either way, they proved to be way better at this assignment than me. I tried my own blackout poem and it wasn't nearly as meaningful or profound as what my students were able to come up with.I love when they prove to be better at something than me.

As my class was leaving at dismissal today, one of my students said to me on her way out, 'Thank you Mrs. Shaum. I'm going to go home tonight and make some poems out of the newspaper."

And I love even more when an assignment inspires them to do or learn something on their own.