rewriting frost

[helenmelon]

this week, i decided to give each class all the nouns and verbs from some classic poem, then ask them (in groups of four) to use the words to come up with poems of their own. they get to add all the pronouns, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions they want. today's class did "stopping by the woods on a snowy evening" by robert frost. i don't

Comments

[gutzilla]

The "lovely horse" must be a prominent idea in Chinese culture.

[helenmelon]

nah. "lovely" is just a word this whole culture has decided means "cute" or "attractive." girls are likely to describe boys they think are really attractive as "lovely." not to say these students were imagining some hot lookin horses, but just that they're more likely to use it casually to mean nice-looking than most people i know.

[gutzilla]

It reminds me of an episode of a British comedy series called Father Ted, where these two priests enter the Eurovision Song Contest with a song called "My Lovely Horse". Hi-larious.

Vel-l-ly intelesting

[zaklog]

A couple of these are quite good.  You can tell they're by non-native speakers.  (I do wonder, though, if that's partly because of keeping the verbs in the same tense.  Were the student's allowed to re-conjugate them?)

You know, I might try the same thing myself sometime.  (Heck, it would even make a cool assignment for a Creative Writing class.)  Where'd you get this idea?

Re: Vel-l-ly intelesting

[helenmelon]

i know they're good. that's why i put them up here. i was impressed. the students technically weren't allowed to reconjugate the words, but that was one of the rules that got bent by some of them. but i figured they should be able to work around pre-conjugated verbs. it is a really neat excercise. i think i'll keep it in mind in case i ever teach writing. the idea developed from another. i have "magnetic poetry"-type stickers and was thinking of using those. i was telling daniel about that idea and we were discussing how i'd do that and somehow we got on the subject of scrambling other poems and he suggested taking out the pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and articles (so they could practice proper usage). i've been thrilled, overall, with the results. but some poems did work better than others.